


alors on danse

by kitseybarbours



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canada, Alternate Universe - Dance, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Hate to Love, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-08-17 00:01:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitseybarbours/pseuds/kitseybarbours
Summary: Between seemingly random bestowals of their art upon the world (guerrilla dance, suggested a Toronto Sun reporter), the Knights rehearse, or don’t; or go on crime sprees, or don’t; or are a motorcycle gang, or a drug-smuggling ring, or a hacktivist group — or they aren’t.
The point is, this company is less a dance troupe and more a legend, and their founder is the greatest myth of all. Hux, like many, wasn’t sure the Knights — or Kylo Ren, for that matter — even existed anymore. It had been six months or so since their last “guerrilla” performance, and the art world was beginning to lose interest in them, when Hux received the email.

The subject line read, Ballet choreographer wanted — Knights of Ren. The “from” line was blank.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [alors on danse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pKrVB5f2W0) by Stromae. New chapters will be posted every second Friday, and tags updated as need be; do please mind them. :)
> 
> Now with a beautiful [moodboard](http://longstoryshortikilledhim.tumblr.com/post/156532817416/alors-on-danse-by-huxes-the-subject-line) by [Johanna](http://longstoryshortikilledhim.tumblr.com/)!

*

March in Montréal is a fickle, tricky month. After a long dreary winter, spring is still just out of reach, tantalising and teasing _les Montréalais_ with a glimpse of sunshine one day and then withdrawing behind a veil of wet snow and grey clouds the next. The weathered stone buildings of Old Montréal preside over the changing seasons like kindly grandparents, providing shelter from the wind and the rain, looking down on the city with tired, knowing eyes.

Brendon Huxley likes his city at this time of year: off-season, the ski hills closed, the summer parties and festivals not yet drawing crowds. The wet weather reminds him of London, of Dublin, of home — although Québec, of course, has been his home for years now. He likes to think he knows this city like the back of his hand; and yet he still feels a growing sense of novelty, anticipation, as he hurries up the stairs from the métro one sunny Tuesday morning.

He doesn’t spend a lot of time downtown, except for on the Rue Ste-Catherine; he doesn’t know any of the side-streets well. At length he spots the Rue d’Iberville and turns down it with hesitation, going closer to the buildings’ doorsteps to read their addresses: _2248, 2250, 2252…_ Hux counts down the numbers and comes to a stop in front of the building whose address matches the one in the email open on his phone. And then he frowns: _This is it?_

The door in front of which he stands is markedly different from the others on the street — it’s made of thick metal, bulletproof-looking, like something you’d find in a bank or an airport. The building’s entryway is set back from the street, an overhang casting shadows that darken the patch of pavement in front, giving Hux a chill when he steps closer to peer at the address next to the battered, rusting mailbox. _2254,_ the metal numbers say; and on the mailbox itself is a jaggedly hand-lettered sign: _Les Chevaliers._

Hux blinks. _This must be the place._

He tries the door (half-expecting a booby trap to go off when he touches the handle), and finds it, bizarrely, unlocked. He steps inside, and the door clangs rather ominously shut behind him. One dim lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, and as his eyes adjust, Hux sees that the dominant feature of this building’s lobby is a rickety-looking black metal staircase — and that there’s nothing much else here at all. The room hardly even looks like a lobby: more like a storage unit, or someone’s vacant and potentially haunted basement suite. Cardboard boxes sit around on the floor, as if waiting for the guest of honour to arrive at a rather depressing surprise party; the air smells musty, and balls of dust collect in the corners of the room.  Hux spies a few cobwebs —  _actual cobwebs,_ he thinks in slight stupefaction — stretching from the underside of the staircase to the wall.

Hux clears his throat. “Hello?"  he calls out, not expecting a response. He doesn’t get one. His sense of anticipation is very quickly turning into annoyance, edged with genuine trepidation. _What if this_ is _a prank after all?_

But he’s not willing to admit defeat just yet. He glances at the staircase and decides to go up.

His steps echo on the metal stairs; he hopes the sound will alert the building’s potential occupants to his presence, and that someone will be waiting for him at the top. But when he gets there, he finds himself in a small waiting area that’s just as deserted as the lobby, featuring a water cooler, a few shabby chairs, an empty boot rack, and an unmanned reception desk bearing the dance company’s logo in that same inky black script. The waiting area opens on to two corridors, leading presumably to dressing rooms, as well as to the single dance studio, which appears to be empty. It’s dimly lit and dusty up here, and the air smells stale, of damp, mould, feet, sweat… _tobacco smoke?_

“Hello?” Hux calls once more: _“Y a quelqu’un?” —_ and he is met, again, with silence.

There’s no sign of the company’s artistic director (with whom Hux has been corresponding for several months now, but whom he’s never met), or of anyone else, for that matter. But now that he’s here — now that he’s passed through the suspicious bank-vault door, made it up the creaking metal steps, and found this, the apparent Promised Land, the dance studio itself, Hux is determined not to give up. _Maybe they’re waiting in the studio?_ Hux toes off his Top-Siders, puts them on the rack, and replaces them with his black canvas ballet slippers, and then steps past the studio’s threshold.

It’s an actual _studio,_ which is a relief. (After all his interactions with the company so far, not to mention everything he’s seen today, Hux still wasn’t entirely convinced that he hadn’t been lured here to be _disposed of_ , and was half-expecting some kind of dungeon with blood dripping down the walls, a dark shape lurking in the corner: _Any last words, ballet boy?...)_

And it’s big. This is reassuring too. He doesn’t know for sure how large of a company he’s going to be working with (since it’s definitely starting to seem, now, that he actually _will_ be working with one), and more space is always better —hopefully not much readjustment will be needed to adapt the future piece for a stage. The dance floor is not new, Hux can tell that much for sure, but he gives an experimental bob on his toes and finds it’s still satisfactorily sprung. On the far wall, a couple dirty windows look out onto the street; two of the other walls are mirrored, as expected, and the east one is decked out with a rickety-looking barre. Hux looks around: there’s no one here.

 _Well._ He checks the time on his phone: 10:22. He _is_ early, something he hadn’t considered when he’d dashed out of the métro and then raced to find the right address, horrified as always by the thought of being late. _They aren’t expecting me until ten-thirty. I can’t fault them for not being prepared,_ Hux reasons. He pushes aside the fact of the building’s apparently total abandonment (with the strange exception of the unlocked door), and decides he might as well make use of his time and start warming up.

Hux crosses to the stereo. He finds an aux cord, plugs in his iPod Classic and queues up his usual warm-up playlist, keeping the volume just high enough to hear. He goes to the barre and begins a set of pliés, his joints cracking as he eases through the familiar movements. _Demi, relevé, grand, relevé…_

He begins to relax, forgetting his irritation and vague sense of unease. He moves on, methodical, to tendus, frappés, developpés, becoming absorbed in the routine, the positions, deaf to everything but the sound of the music and the movements of his body —

“Who are you?” a deep voice asks in French.

Hux looks up, guilty, at once. His right hand drops from its port-de-bras and his left foot swings out of its attitude. In the doorway stands a very tall, very muscular man wearing a grey hoodie over his dance clothes, his hair tied into a messy bun and a lit cigarette between in his fingers. A large black dance bag is slumped on the ground near his feet, obviously just dropped there; its owner looks distinctly unimpressed.

 _Finally!_ A company member, someone who’s definitely supposed to be here and will know that Hux is, too.

“I’m sorry,” Hux says immediately, in French as well. He can’t deny his relief: part of him was still not convinced that this whole job wasn’t just a set-up. He goes quickly to turn off his music, leaving the room dead silent. “I’m the guest choreographer — I shouldn’t have been in the studio, but I thought I could warm up before the company arrived — and the door was unlocked. I know I’m early.” He crosses the room to the tall man and holds out an apologetic hand. “Brendon Huxley.”

“Kylo Ren,” the man says, sounding bored, in an accent that is far more Laurentides than Boulevard Saint-Laurent. He looks at Hux’s hand like it’s a dead fish someone’s left on his doorstep, and doesn’t take it. Hux drops it to his side. “You may call me Ren. The door wasn’t supposed to be unlocked. And the company won’t be arriving.”

 _“You’re_ Kylo Ren,” Hux repeats, stunned. “Oh. God. Of course you are.”

He hadn’t recognised the dancer at first, but now, seeing him up close, he knows his face from hundreds of ads in the métro, arts-season calendars, newspaper front pages and magazine covers…

This is Benjamin Organa-Solo, alias Kylo Ren, former principal dancer for his mother’s world-renowned ballet company, La Résistance. Born in Montréal, he trained in Paris as a teenager under the tutelage of a mysterious choreographer known only as S.; he then came back to Québec and single-handedly made a new name for the Résistance, which had lost much of its former glory since Léa Organa’s retirement.

With the nineteen-year-old Ben as one of their principals, La Résistance again attracted some of the best choreographers in the world, all clamouring for the chance to create something for Ben Solo to dance. Season tickets sold out within minutes of going up for sale, and the Place des Arts even offered to sign Résistance on as their new home company. Suddenly Montréal was the vibrant epicentre of the international dance world, and nothing was too good for its new darling — this lanky, gangly, fierce-faced boy who came from the bad part of town, who danced with a fire and a fervour the likes of which the world had never seen: angel and enfant terrible all rolled into one.

And then, three years later, proclaimed by the _New York Times,_ the _Telegraph, Dance_ magazine, and anyone with functioning eyes to be the greatest young danseur of the 21st century — with a soaring career ahead of him and the world at his well-turned-out feet — Ben quit.

Quit ballet, that is, in favour of founding the most controversial, least mainstream, and some say _best_ modern dance company in North America (or maybe the world): the Knights of Ren, a.k.a. Les Chevaliers, in whose dingy studio Hux is now standing. Their performances are always apparently impromptu, in bizarre, unexpected locations — abandoned warehouses in Côte-des-Neiges; basements of office buildings or old hotels; once, Terminal 3 at the airport, in the middle of the night. As such, very few people have ever actually _seen_ them dance — and, to add still more to the mystique, they perform wearing masks.

Between these seemingly random bestowals of their art upon the world ( _guerrilla dance,_ suggested a _Toronto Sun_ reporter), the Knights rehearse, or don’t; or go on crime sprees, or don’t; or are a motorcycle gang, or a drug-smuggling ring, or a hacktivist group — or they aren’t.

The point is, this company is less a dance troupe and more a legend, and their founder is the greatest myth of all. Hux, like many, wasn’t sure the Knights — or Kylo Ren, for that matter — even existed anymore. It had been six months or so since their last “guerrilla” performance, and the art world was beginning to lose interest in them, when Hux received the anonymous email.

The subject line read, _Ballet choreographer wanted — Knights of Ren._ The “from” line was blank.

Hux had thought it was a hoax at first, obviously. Even if the Knights _were_ still around (not to mention real), their founder/artistic director/apparently only choreographer was _Benjamin Organa-Solo,_ regardless of whatever he was calling himself lately. If the Knights needed a ballet choreographed, they shouldn’t have had to look any further.

Hux knew he should have just deleted the email, ignored it as spam and never thought of it again. His cursor had been hovering over the little trash-can icon when the thought had popped into his head: _What if?_

If it was real — if this was a genuine job offer and not some balletomane’s prank — it would be…well. It would be the chance of a lifetime. More than that: the chance of a hundred, a thousand lifetimes. To choreograph for the _Knights of Ren —_ for Ben Solo _himself,_ assuming he was still alive and dancing with them — well. Only a complete and utter madman would have turned down a chance like that.

Hux prides himself on being not in the least bit mad. He opened the email.

In perfect, very formal English, it read:

_Mr. Huxley,_

_I am the artistic director for a modern dance company known as the Knights of Ren. I hope you’ll forgive me for choosing not to disclose my real name, and for henceforth conducting my business with you in a mostly anonymous fashion._

About here, Hux started to get suspicious again, flights of fancy fading: _I can’t trust this, I shouldn’t trust this._

But there, still: _what if?_

He kept reading.

_The company will be performing in this year’s Festival TransAmériques in our home city of Montréal. We need a new work for the festival, and I have decided to invite a guest choreographer in order to challenge my dancers and expand their horizons as artists._

_Your solo work — particularly “Starkiller", as well as your more recent work with le Premier Ordre — has caught my eye, and after much consideration and observation of your own as well as of other international companies, I’ve decided that you will have the honour of choreographing for us…_

Hux had stopped reading at this point, and, truth be told, almost stopped breathing as well. Patronising tone aside (“I’ve _decided_ you will have the honour” _– Ben Solo or not, this guy needs a serious attitude adjustment),_ the offer seemed — fairly, frighteningly — legit. He’d quickly skimmed the rest of the email and found no phone number, no address, nothing, and felt his suspicions mounting along with his excitement — until he reached the end.

The email was signed _Kylo Ren._

The Knights aren’t _so_ underground as to be completely anonymous; anyone who’s anyone in the dance world has heard that name tossed around in scorn or in awe. “Kylo Ren” was Ben Solo’s assumed identity, or had been when he founded the company: debates now raged as to whether the name was still borne by him, or else by a new leader who’d taken over the troupe and, along with it, the title. As the Knights wore masks to perform and rehearsed in secret at an undisclosed location, there was no way to be sure.

Unless, of course, you’d been _invited to choreograph for them._

Hux had hovered over the _Reply_ button for a solid ten minutes before making up his mind: _What if it’s fake? What if it’s some kind of trick? Some sort of, I don’t know, assassination plot?_   he remembers thinking wildly. But eventually, he came to a decision.

_What’s the worst that could happen, assassination aside? It’s a prank. It’s a hoax. I don’t get a job, and the kid who sent this from his Val-des-Loups basement has a good laugh. Fine. It’s fine._

(Hux hardly dared to let himself imagine what would happen if it _wasn’t_ fake. _One step at a time.)_

He accepted.

That was just over three months ago. Since then, he’s taken a brief leave of absence from his own ballet company, le Premier Ordre (whose season, luckily, was almost finished anyway.) He’s left his dancers in the very capable hands of Caroline Phasme, an old friend from his Royal Academy days, whose career as première danseuse with the Paris Opera Ballet was cut short at age twenty-eight by a broken hip. She now teaches in London, but was thoroughly pleased to move temporarily to Montréal and take over as acting artistic director for l’Ordre while Hux embarked on his, as she called it, “absolutely bonkers leap of faith.”

And now here Hux is, at the studio on the Rue d’Iberville, the address of which he’d been emailed yesterday night — after not hearing from “Kylo Ren” for weeks, after this last had confirmed Hux’s acceptance of the offer and announced that he’d be paid a frankly eye-popping sum _upon satisfactory completion, teaching and performance of an original piece._ He’s at the studio, being sized-up by the tall, over-muscled, vaguely threatening young man who was once — and is, perhaps, still — the most famous living dancer in the world.

In the wake of Hux’s astonished pronouncement, Kylo Ren is utterly unmoved. He raises his eyebrows: “Yes,” he says, as if the very words are a burden; “I am.” He takes a drag of his cigarette.

“Sorry — did you say the company _wouldn’t_ be arriving?” Hux asks in a rush, coming back to his senses.

Kylo Ren nods. “You won’t be choreographing for them,” he announces in the same monotone. He uses the informal _tu_ with Hux right away, and it takes Hux aback for a moment: he danced in Paris for several years before moving to Canada and founding l’Ordre, and the Québécois habit of disregarding the formal _vous,_ even in business situations, still surprises him every time. “You’ll be choreographing for me.”

Ren takes a final drag of his cigarette. Then he plucks the butt out of his mouth and crushes it under his bare heel, right there on the sprung, weathered, creaking hardwood dance floor. “Shall we begin?”

Hux gapes. He blinks twice in rapid succession, glancing at the little ashy smudge now burnt into the wood — he sees others, strewn across the dance floor like the beauty-spots scattered across Ren’s face. He’s not sure he’s heard Ren right. “I’m _sorry?”_

“I need an exhibition piece,” Ren says flatly. “For the Festival.”

“But — not for your _company_ ,” Hux replies slowly, trying to puzzle this out. (He uses _vous,_ feeling much less at ease than Ren apparently is here.) Ren nods. “A solo piece?” He winces at the unintentional pun, and hopes Ren doesn’t think he’s making fun of him.

“No,” Ren corrects, sounding irritated. “A duet. And I need a choreographer.”

“And…a partner?” Hux asks hesitantly, beginning to see where this is going.

Ren nods, testy, as if this is all supposed to be completely obvious. “Yes.”

“And that’s why I’m here.” Hux bites his lip.

“Obviously.”

“I see.” Hux takes a breath, pressing one foot and then another into demi-pointe. “Well — that wasn’t the agreement,” he begins, not sure how to do this, and Ren cuts him off:

“I know,” he says, his accent seeming to grow thicker with impatience. “I said it was for the whole company because I knew you’d be more inclined to believe that than if I’d asked you to choreograph a solo piece,” he explains rapidly, annoyance rolling off him in waves. “I needed a good choreographer. The best. I found you.”

He clams up firmly, as if this explains everything. Hux is struck silent.

“You couldn’t choreograph for yourself? Find a partner from your — company?” Hux asks tentatively, after a moment.

“No.”

It seems that’s all he’s going to get from him, at least for right now. Hux sighs, his earlier trepidation slowly returning: _This is going to be…something._

“ _D’accord. Alors._ Are you warmed up already?” he asks Ren, cutting to the chase: he figures they might as well get straight to dancing, seeing as talking’s gotten them nowhere. Ren shakes his head. “I was almost done my barre, but we can start over, if that’s all right with you?” Hux asks awkwardly. “It — shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Ren shoots him a look that says, _I toured solo at the age of fifteen, I think I can handle your warm-up,_ and stalks over to the barre. Hux swallows. _Right._

“Have you got slippers?” Hux remembers at the last minute, glancing down at Ren’s still-bare feet. Modern dance is done barefoot, and Ren, presumably, hasn’t done ballet for years. Hux wonders if wearing shoes is an annoyance to him now: he’s heard other modern dancers complain that they can’t _connect_ to their movements with a layer of leather or fabric in the way. Hux thinks this is complete bullshit, but he wouldn’t at all be surprised if Ren didn’t. He braces himself for a sneer and a snobbish lecture on the benefits of dancing shoeless, _connecting_ to the floor or whatever, _God have mercy_  —

But with only a slightly put-upon grunt and the barest hint of a scowl, Ren turns his back and squats down to rummage in his dance bag, eventually emerging with a pair of black canvas slippers that look almost new. He slides them on and then shuffles over to the barre.

“Okay.” Hux restarts the warm-up playlist and takes his place behind Ren at the barre, keeping a safe distance from those ridiculously long legs. “Do you need me to talk you through it, or are you all right to follow along?” Hux asks stupidly, and is rewarded for his blunder by another glare from Ren, in the mirror this time but no less scathing. “All right. Thought so.”

He counts himself in and then starts the pliés again; Ren picks up the rhythm right away. Hux has already done most of these exercises today, of course, and it gives him the opportunity to focus less on what _he’s_ doing and more on what _Ren_ is.

His movements are graceful and sinuous, even just for warm-up. His pliés are deep, his tendus and frappés strong and sharp; his extension is incredible, his limbs loose but poised. Hux feels his eyes on him when they change sides, turning around at the barre so now Ren’s behind him, and draws himself up even further, puts extra precision in his pointed toes and turned-out hips. _You don’t have to prove anything to him,_ he chides himself; but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

The barre playlist ends. Hux, distracted, misses a beat and drops his attitude quickly, without grace: Ren raises his eyebrows. “Er — good. Well done. Let’s move on,” Hux says, glad to turn away from Ren’s icy stare. “Petit allegro, now. Watch me.”

Hux goes to the centre of the room and demonstrates a brief petit allegro combination, simple enough — a couple steps, a few smaller jumps. “Got it?”

Ren says nothing. Hux starts the music and folds his arms, counts him in: “Five, six, seven, eight.”

He’s not at all surprised by what he sees: Ren moves with disdainful ease, executing high, tight jumps with his toes firmly pointed, his arms relaxed and lazily perfect. This combo is too easy for him; Hux knew that when he chose it, and Ren is making _sure_ he knows it. The perfection of his movements is a direct insult to Hux — a challenge.

“All right,” Hux says, when Ren finishes and shoots him a dark glare. “Let’s keep going.” He shows him another combo, longer this time, more involved, and then starts the next song.

Looking bored Ren slides into a chassé, waiting for the beat, and as soon as Hux counts _huit_ he’s off — but it’s immediately clear that it’s not the combo Hux gave him. He whirls through a cycle of turns, leaps with knifelike precision, lands perfectly and lifts his back leg into an impossibly high arabesque — stone-faced all the while. Hux frowns. Ren looks directly at him and raises his eyebrows.

Hux holds his gaze, refusing to look away: _So this is how it’s going to be._

“Good,” Hux says, pausing the music. “Or it would have been good, if it was the combo I’d given you,” he continues pleasantly. “Which it wasn’t.”

“What you gave me was too easy,” Ren fires back, surly.

“I know it was,” Hux responds. “It was a test. To see how well you’d take direction.”

Ren’s eyebrows draw angrily together. “I don’t appreciate being _tested_ in my own studio, Huxley.” His accent makes him drop the _H;_ the pronunciation sounds contemptuous, as though they’re Wolfe and Montcalm themselves, facing off on the Plaines d’Abraham way back in 1759.

“In that case, you should choreograph this piece yourself, _Ren,”_ Hux replies, his tone still light and cordial. “If you’re paying me to create a piece for you, you’re going to have to listen to me.”

Ren seethes at him. At his sides, his long fingers clench at the air: Hux is struck with the sudden fear that he’s going to cross the room and strangle him. He can see the headline already: _Renowned choreographer Brendon Huxley throttled to death by petulant recluse formerly known as Ben Solo…_

But the moment passes. Ren’s hands relax and he says crisply, “Fine. What else have you got?”

“That’s more like it,” Hux says. He smiles coolly. “Shall we move on?”

The morning passes quickly, and the studio grows hot. By the time the sun is high in the grey-blue sky, they are both sweating with exertion and humidity, and Hux has taught Ren a fairly intricate combo. It’s not the piece they’ll be performing, or not yet, anyway: Hux has a few vague ideas floating around, some patterns and steps he’d like to use, but he hasn’t got a whole dance planned out yet, not even the music. And he’s certainly not ready to start doing partner work with Ren.

He can already tell that dancing with Ren is going to be difficult. But _watching_ him dance is not that at all: _he is, quite simply, exquisite._

Hux finds himself looking for faults, nitpicking every last thing — true, Ren’s technique could use a little polishing; the years of modern show, although the ballet fundamentals are present and strong. But more so than that, he feels he _needs_ to correct him on _something,_ anything: but whether this is to prove Ren is human and is making mistakes; because he, Hux, is jealous; or because he feels compelled to drive Ren to the absolute perfection he already knows he can attain, Hux can hardly say.

“No. There. No — watch your turnout. Higher on the pas de chat. There.”

Ren finishes the combo for what seems like the twentieth time, and Hux decides he’s finally satisfied. Truth be told, he was happy with it about six times ago, but watching Ren dance is…intoxicating. _He’s connected to his body in a way that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,_ Hux thinks, watching him execute his highest grand jeté of the day. _His movements are so fluid, so passionate — it’s simply incredible. No wonder he made his world début when he was only fifteen…_ He shakes his head. _Enough._

“All right. Take a break,” Hux calls, as Ren strikes his final attitude. He turns off the music, and at once Ren slouches out of the posture and loafs over to his overflowing bag — hoodie, keys, waterbottle, phone all spilling out of its half-open top — at the front of the room. He throws his head back and takes a long drink of water, his eyes closed: Hux finds himself staring at the long elegant line of his throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he drinks. His grey tank top is damp with sweat, sticking to his absurdly muscled back and chest — _Stop it._

Ren puts down the water and stalks past Hux, out of the studio, without so much as looking at him as he passes. Hux swallows. Feeling furtive and guilty for no good reason, he finds his own water, takes a drink, and towels off briefly. It feels good to be choreographing again — he hasn’t done anything original of note since London, since _Starkiller._ His work for l’Ordre has stuck mostly, so far, to new adaptations of classic works; and although he loves reinterpreting and then teaching those works to his dancers, he thinks he’s always loved this more: creating, sharing, shaping a piece of his own; bringing it to life.

“Huxley.”

 _‘Uxley,_ it sounds like. Hux turns, surprised despite himself.

“Yes?”

“I don’t like it,” Ren says bluntly.

Hux is taken aback. “I’m sorry?”

“This piece. I don’t like it,” Ren elaborates unhelpfully. His hair is coming loose from its bun, and his (frankly massive) arms are crossed over his (unnecessarily muscular) chest. Hux frowns.

“We’ve barely gotten started,” Hux replies. “I haven’t even choreographed the whole thing yet — what we’ve done so far might get scrapped in the end, I don’t know. I’m just trying some things out.”

“I don’t like it,” Ren repeats, again. His eyebrows are drawn obstinately together, over eyes that are not as bottomlessly dark as Hux had first thought them to be: Ren stands backlit by the dusty windows, and in the noontime light his eyes reveal themselves to be a deep clear hazel-grey-chocolate.

“Can you do better?” Hux challenges.

Already he should’ve known better than not to expect a response. Ren’s eyebrows arch. _Fuck._

“Of course.” Ren crosses the room to the stereo.

Hux cries out in protest when Ren picks up his battered iPod Classic — “That’s mine!” — and begins to scroll through his music.

“Your taste is shit,” Ren informs him, dismissive and completely serious. All the same, he seems to find something acceptable. He presses play.

Hux recognises the song at once: slow, tumbling piano notes in a minor key, trailing up and down the scale before launching into a rhythm like waves. He frowns: “ _Muse?”_

Ren ignores him. He goes to the centre of the room and silently counts himself in. As Matt Bellamy begins to moan the vocals, Ren begins to dance. It’s Hux’s combo, but different: he takes out a jump here, adds a turn there. The arms are — louder, is the only way Hux can describe them. A port-de-bras that is perfectly controlled and yet bursting with something, with energy and tension that hadn’t been there before.

_Hm._

The song is long, but Ren never loses momentum, seeming only to gain energy and intensity as he goes along. Hux’s choreography had been less than thirty-six counts, but here is Ren still dancing, improvising but maintaining the patterns Hux had set out: he recognises a pas de chat into a double pirouette (Ren makes it a triple, of course) that he had, in fact, intended to become a motif. The music is eerie, melodic yet dissonant, and Ren dances like it was made for him, for his movements and his body. As the song devolves into a rough, dramatic orchestral section, Ren’s technique grows bolder, less classical and more _true:_ an unravelling paralleling that in the song.

The song draws to a close with scratching static, faint discordant guitar notes, and Ren slows down, tumbles deliberately into a lazy arabesque with his arms limp at his sides. His eyes are closed.

Hux is, quite simply, astounded.

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Ren remains frozen.

Hux turns on his heel and leaves the studio.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Ren dances to is [Space Dementia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaRkR9E3078) by Muse.
> 
> Et bien — je parle français assez habilement et je suis certainement canadienne, mais je ne suis _pas_ montréalaise; alors, je m'excuse sincèrement pour toutes inexactitudes! In the same vein, I danced both ballet and modern for a number of years, but I am by no definition a professional; all mistakes and poor choreographic choices are entirely my own.
> 
> Billions of thanks to my literary other half, [Redcap64](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Redcap64/pseuds/Redcap64), for walking me through many an existential breakdown about this fic, and for loving these weird dance-y kids as much as I do. Thank you for being the Hux to my Kylo in the least dark-and-twisted way possible. ;)
> 
> Love and thanks also, as ever, to my darling [bygoneboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoneboy/pseuds/bygoneboy), whose commentary on the draft made me laugh just as much as I made him cry, and whose [surprise illustrations](http://bygoneboy.tumblr.com/post/150850498517/he-hadnt-recognised-the-dancer-at-first-but-now) caused some truly embarrassing shrieking and voice-cracking in my kitchen one night. (The Top-Siders are for you, my sweet son.)
> 
> Still more thanks to my dear friend [Sam](http://cerimint.tumblr.com/), who suggested that I call this fic "Dancing With the Star Wars": you'll notice that I've not taken his advice after all, but rest assured, I was tempted. (And I've not forgotten [this](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/1f/7d/33/1f7d3361fbc44b98b0bad7d69b490295.jpg), either, trust me.)
> 
> Je vous aime tous. ❤︎


	2. Chapter 2

*

The next morning Hux decides to act as if nothing had happened at all. He recognises that his behaviour had been — childish, to say the least, and downright disrespectful at most; but he also doesn’t feel like _apologising_ to Ren, thus shifting the balance of power in his direction. _All’s fair in dance and war, and all that…_

He arrives at the studio early and finds the door to the building locked, this time —  _I’ll have to see about getting a key._ So he waits patiently, leaning against the doorframe and sipping his green tea, running through counts and movements in his head, checking his phone every few minutes. When Ren finally shows up — at 10:48, according to Hux’s watch, nearly twenty minutes past the agreed time, and offering no explanation for his lateness — Hux greets him pleasantly:

“Hello, Ren,” he says. He smiles, one hand still jammed nonchalantly in the pocket of his navy peacoat: yesterday’s sunshine has been replaced with a wet, drizzly gloom. Ren grunts in return and moves past him to unlock the door. Hux gestures with his Starbucks cup: “Sorry, I didn’t get you anything. If you tell me your order I could pick something up tomorrow,” he offers.

For all his laid-back airs he’s still using _vous,_ and Ren must notice. He levels Hux with a withering look that slices right through his politesse. “I don’t drink coffee.” Ren starts tramping up the stairs, his overstuffed dance bag —  _what does he_ have _in there? —_ slung over one broad shoulder.

Hux follows him up the stairs. “I don’t either. Tea, then? Frappuccino or something?”

Ren pauses in his ascent and turns around to glare at him. “I said no.”

Hux holds up his hands in surrender. “All right! Sorry I asked.”

A peeved, growly “hmm” is Ren’s only reply.

Upstairs, without yesterday’s influx of sunshine, it’s cold; the building is old, the central heating faulty at best, worn out by winter after harsh Canadian winter. Ren crosses to a thermostat on the outside wall of the studio and gives it a couple sharp knocks to turn it on, then fiddles roughly with the dial for a moment: Hux hears from within the bowels of the building the surprised kick-start of the furnace. “There,” Ren mutters. “Let’s go.”

He kicks off his clunky Doc Martens and tosses them underneath the boot-rack before opening the studio door and going in, flipping the lights on as he passes. Hux, meanwhile, unlaces his own L.L. Bean boots and places them neatly on the top rack. He follows Ren inside, setting down his bag and his tea on the table at the front before sinking gracefully to the floor to put on his ballet slippers. He shivers in his light dance clothes and hopes the dancing will warm him.

Slippers on, Hux queues up his warm-up playlist, and they run through a barre in utter silence apart from the music. When they’ve finished, he says, “Take some time to stretch, we’re going to be jumping today.” _Hopefully._

Ren skulks off to a corner and throws one leg up along the barre, leaning impossibly far into the stretch. Hux finds himself watching him, briefly astonished —  _I’ve never seen anyone that flexible, Jesus Christ —_ and then Ren’s eyes meet his in the mirror and Hux quickly looks away. He busies himself with his music, finding an instrumental piece that’s long enough for them both to get in some decent stretching.

“We made a good start yesterday,” Hux says casually, after a few moments of them each doing their own thing. He’s stuck to the basics, slowly warming-up his hips, his hamstrings, and his metatarsals, which are prone to tightness; Ren has now moved on to some bizarre yogic contortions that look like they shouldn’t be possible outside of a circus act. “I think this is going to go well.”

“Do you?” Ren asks flatly: the first time he’s spoken since the stairs. He drops one leg and pulls the other, seemingly without effort, practically above his shoulder. Hux winces a little. “Because I was thinking I might have to rescind my offer.”

Hux blinks. His mouth opens slightly in indignation. _Is that why he’s been so quiet? He’s been_ thinking _about this?_ He reverts to English without even thinking, quick to jump to his own defence: “Your _offer?_ This is not an _offer,_ Ren, this is a _contract._ A _business agreement._ We’ve signed the papers! I’m choreographing for you. You can’t just _decide_ to fire me after only one day.”

He’s aware that it’s not his best, or even most fluently expressed argument; but he thinks he’s gotten his point across. However, Ren, of course — Hux barely knows him but is already picking up on his annoying habits — finds a loophole in his hasty words. “After only one day?” he repeats, in English too now, his Québec accent thick. “So, then, if after _two_ days I don’t like you —  _paf._ Contract retracted?”

Hux glowers at him. _A brilliant start, this._

 _“Non,”_ he responds, keeping his voice cool and level. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. What I _meant_ was that I will not be treated this way. You’ve hired me for a reason: you admire my work and you want my expertise. You want me to choreograph a duet for you, to be performed at the FTA. For whatever reason, you could not choreograph something yourself and find a partner from your own company,” he lists off in rapid, clipped French. _“N’est-ce pas?_  You have hired me to create a piece and then to dance it with you, Ren. You have hired me to dance. So let’s dance.”

With this he stands and goes to the stereo. He picks up his iPod and selects a playlist he doesn’t use very often. It’s all the quickest, most unusual pieces he’s got, the challenging ones that he uses if he’s trying to fine-tune his own technique or that of one of his particularly gifted dancers. These tempos are tough: not natural to dance to, rapidly changing, unpredictable. _Like Ren._ “Go,” he says carelessly. “You don’t like what I made for you, so make something up. Dance.”

Ren glares at him —  _he glares almost as well as he dances, I will give him that._ And then he starts to dance.

The piece starts out in simple 3/4 time. Ren finds a pattern quickly, throws himself into a furious sequence of fouettés followed by a series of neat, scissoring jumps. But the tempo soon changes, abruptly shifting to quintuple meter, 5/8 time; Ren is thrown off his rhythm, and nearly stumbles. He pauses, looking murderous, for a moment; Hux leans back, crossing his arms, and raises his eyebrows at him – “Go on,” he calls. “What are you waiting for? Why did you stop?”

Hux swears he hears Ren, over the pounding percussion and slicing strings, give a hiss. And then he starts to move again, and Hux is blinded.

It’s not ballet. Not quite, anyway. The foundations are there — precise and deliberate turnout, a certain set of the arms — but atop those foundations is something else entirely. It’s modern, and it’s not; there’s a hint of tango, almost, and a certain determination that Hux associates with jazz. It’s strange, wild, passionate. It shouldn’t work at all.

But it does.

And it gives Hux an idea.

He goes to the stereo as Ren executes a powerful, angry stag jump, his head coming up to nearly brush the ceiling. He turns off the music. Ren lands hard, his weight thumping to the ground, in a deep plié.

“Why did you stop me?” he asks at once, his voice simmering. “I danced. I was dancing for you. It was better than what you gave me,” he says bluntly. He opens his mouth as if to go on, no doubt ready to unleash a tirade, but Hux speaks over him.

“I know,” he says firmly. “I _know._ ” Ren frowns. “It _was_ better,” Hux agrees. “Much better, in fact. And that’s why I stopped you — because we’re going to keep this. We’re going to dance this. Together.”

Ren’s frown deepens, deepens, his eyebrows rapidly encroaching on his angry dark eyes. “We’re _what?”_

Hux smirks. “If you won’t dance what I give you, and you won’t take direction from me, then we will just have to work together, I think,” he says. “We’ll keep —  _this,_ whatever it is, whatever you’re doing — because I like it, because it’s different. And we’ll improve on it further. We’ll shape it into something with at least _some_ form and structure, something that’s not totally improvised. It won’t be modern,” he says, nodding to Ren, “because that’s not what you want, that’s not why you hired me; but it won’t be completely ballet, either. It’ll be something else. Something better.”

After this little speech there is silence. Ren’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t speak for a long time. And then:

“Equals,” he says finally. “We will be equals.”

A strange thing to say; a question, Hux thinks. He answers as if it is one.

“I suppose we will, yes. If that’s what you’d like.” _Because you’re obviously not going to let me have any power over you._

Another long moment stretches out between them; Ren appears to be thinking, and hard. But eventually he gives a curt nod. “All right. Equals.”

Hux nods too. He feels oddly relieved. He still has his iPod in his hand; he lays it down now, and steps closer to Ren. He holds out his hand: this time, Ren takes it. Hux grasps his hand firmly. “To our partnership, then.”

“To our partnership.”

The words seem fragile even as they say them. They break apart and stand awkwardly in the quiet dusty room for a moment; then Hux glances at the clock, says, “All right, break for lunch” — they’ve passed the whole morning already — and Ren leaves the room at once.

Hux takes a long drink of water and gives an even longer sigh. In hindsight, he doesn’t know what he was thinking. _There’s no way this can work._

But then he thinks of Ben — Ben Solo, not Ren: the powerful, bold young soloist whom he’s seen dance countless times, although not once in the flesh.

They were both based in Paris at the same time, in the mid-2000s; but Hux was tied to a company, whereas Ren toured solo all over Europe and the world, under the guidance and management of the mysterious S. Hux danced in Paris for another three years after Ben moved back to Québec and joined la Résistance in 2009, and by the time he emigrated to Montréal in 2012, _Ben_ had already disappeared, abandoning the world of classical ballet for modern dance’s underworld and his Knights of Ren. As such, Hux has never had the chance to see him dance live.

His YouTube history, though, from the time Ren first contacted him to now, has told the story, in blurry clips and rare rehearsal videos, of Ben Solo’s whole dance career. From the age of fourteen he’s been wowing crowds in Vienna, Havana, Milan, Moscow, his paradoxical combination of technical perfection and disregard for convention creating a perfect storm, an irresistible performance. _Ballet for a new age. The ballet of the future._

And that kind of background cannot simply be forgotten and tossed aside, try as Ben had when he formed the Knights of Ren. Surely even underneath the modern dance, the envelope-pushing to the point of notoriety, some of that young danseur still remains — and will be able to be shaped, moulded, refined by Hux into something the likes of which the world has never seen.

_This can’t work. Or can it?_

*

Hux’s high hopes are brought crashing down almost at once. They learn very quickly that they don’t dance well together.

That first day, the day Ren took Hux’s piece and turned it on its head and made it wilder, made it better, they make a start. Hux joins Ren on the floor and follows him as he dances — Ren recreates the sequence at Hux’s request, but Hux can tell that it’s not quite the same as it had been at first, that Ren is toying with it and improving it as he goes. They run through it over and over: after a few changing repetitions, Hux demands that Ren make up his mind and codify at least _something,_ a baseline; and finally he does. Hux follows him and mirrors him, and they dance. It still seems like it will work.

“All right,” Hux says, sometime in the mid-afternoon, once they’ve gotten about sixty counts down, repeated, and into some kind of shape. “Now let me have the next bit.”

Ren grunts, but doesn’t protest. Hux throws together another twenty-four counts or so, riffing off Ren’s section as well as some ideas of his own, and dances it for Ren, solo; the next time Ren joins in, copying him now (and dancing it better, Hux can already see; this observation sends an ugly spark of jealousy shooting down his spine.) They dance through it a few times, and then tack it on to Ren’s part, and it _still_ seems like it will work: the two sections meld well, sharing as they do a common foundation.

(The music works well, too — Hux picked a different piece after Ren grumbled, upon returning from lunch, that the first piece Hux had chosen was “ridiculous”, and claimed he couldn’t take it seriously enough to dance to. The one they’ve settled on now has a simpler time signature, a man’s voice crooning mournfully over heavy orchestrations punctuated with sounds like breaking glass. Hux played three or four others before it, all of which were met with scowls from Ren, before finally he gave this one the tiniest of nods. _Good enough for me.)_

And then they get to the partner work.

“What we’re doing right now is fine,” Hux says, chest rising and falling rapidly as he stops dancing and goes to pause the music in the middle of a phrase. “We can keep it. But we’re also going to need to dance _together.”_ He raises his eyebrows at Ren and sees that he catches his meaning. A look of displeasure flashes across Ren’s face, one that Hux is sure is mirrored (if perhaps not quite so _visibly)_ in his own expression.

He’s been dreading this all day — since he first met Ren, really — but knows it’s nearly unavoidable. Any credible pas de deux that’s even remotely related to classical ballet (his experience in which, he has to keep reminding himself, is the very reason Ren’s hired him) involves partner work in which the partners are, well, _actually touching —_ and it’s this which makes Hux so nervous.

It’s not that Ren is bigger than him, stronger, taller. (Hux is tall too, but he’s willowy and slight; his few male partners over the years have all been larger than him, his female ones bird-boned and tiny.) It’s not that Ren could probably break Hux’s arm without blinking if he so desired (and, judging by the flares of anger that appear in Ren’s eyes whenever Hux corrects him, or demands that they start a section over, or executes a turn more precisely than Ren, he _does_ so desire.) It’s that Ren is volatile, and tough, and stubborn, and _gorgeous,_ in a strange dark violent way, and Hux is not certain that upon touching him he will not burst into flames.

“Together,” Ren repeats. His lips twitch as if tasting something unpleasant. “All right. Start the music and come here.”

Hux had not been expecting this — he’d been prepared for whining, bluster, resistance _._ But he recognises in Ren’s eyes a kind of _get-it-over-with_ look, one he’s sure he’s wearing himself; so he nods, businesslike, starts the song over, and goes to Ren’s side.

“What did you have in mind?” he asks over the music, putting on a cautious, respectful smile, akin to approaching a biting horse with a sugar-cube in the flat of his palm. He’s glad to hand direction, for now at least, over to Ren — if he has ideas, then (hopefully) all Hux will have to do is dance them.

“I don’t know,” Ren says with grim determination. Hux’s face falls. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Come here — come closer.”

He holds out a hand. Hesitant, Hux takes it. Ren draws him (none too gently) into a simple partnered position, the starting point of most pas de deux: not facing each other, Hux in an arabesque and Ren’s hands on his waist. Hux stands very still as the music plays on, running through their existing choreography in his head, trying not to think about Ren’s massive hands nearly encircling his waist, the warmth of his body under his form-fitting dance clothes. He becomes suddenly aware of his heartbeat, pounding too fast, _from the cardio, obviously, the jumping, that’s it,_ and then all at once the counts they’ve already choreographed run out, and Ren is counting softly, _cinq, six, sept, huit,_ and now they are dancing.

Or more accurately, they’re _trying_ to dance. At first, Ren takes the lead, turning Hux to face him and stepping into what is nearly a tango, and for the first few counts Hux follows him, glad to have some direction. But after a brief section of this, Hux has an idea, and gently steers Ren into a promenade, switching the positions of their hands — and is met with resistance. Ren doesn’t move.

Hux frowns. “Follow me,” he says, too loud over the music: they are inches apart, bodies still pressed tango-close.

“I wasn’t done,” Ren says back. They stand nearly face-to-face, Ren’s large nose looming in Hux’s view, his big dark eyes unblinking. Hux feels the vibrations of his deep voice in his chest. Ren takes up Hux’s hands and moves them, roughly, back to where they were, and starts leading him back the opposite way. This time it’s Hux who stands his ground.

“I have an idea,” Hux says, and the music plays on. He stands firmly. Ren’s hands are too tight around his waist. “Let me show you.” Ren rolls his eyes, but his grip loosens, and he lets himself be led for a few more counts before Hux stops, getting into a relevé sous sus position and taking a deep plié. “Can you lift me?” Hux asks. “A cambré press.”

“Obviously,” Ren growls — and then all at once his hands are on Hux’s waist again, and he propels him into the air, high above his head. Hux has no time to prepare and so cries out, his body seizing into an unlovely rictus hardly approaching proper form.

“Put me down,” he says through gritted teeth, inverted in the cambré position, and then repeats himself, nearly shouting over the music: “Ren! Put me down!”

Hux barely has time to arch up through his spine before Ren drops him to the ground. His shinbones vibrate with the impact, and he winces, glaring at Ren and making to go pause the music — but Ren grabs his arm. “Follow me,” he commands, and _by God, surely the song should have ended by now, surely it can’t still be going on?_

“Fine,” Hux snarls, and lets Ren lead him again, through a quicker set of movements as the tempo of the music changes, going into the bridge — a darting daring thing; their bodies come together and apart almost naturally at last — but then he takes the lead once more, and forces Ren to follow him. Ren locks eyes with him and a sneer twists his lovely lips. He understands.

They carry on like this, fighting for control as the rest of the song plays out, forcing each other in and out of the lead. It is not good. It is not pretty. The dance devolves into a mess, a sham, the barest façade for their war games. They get nothing done.

“We can’t keep any of this,” Hux announces, finally, when the song has at last come to its close and they have fallen, abruptly, apart from each other: magnetic poles repelling. They stand panting for a moment, glaring at each other, raw anger coursing through the air between them: they’ve both been hijacked; they’ve sabotaged each other and themselves. Hux glances at the clock: four-thirty already, half an hour later than normal. He sighs in vexation. “None of it is workable. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Ren murmurs something, a curse in French, under his breath. Without a word he turns from Hux and goes to collect his things. “Ten-thirty,” he tosses over his shoulder as he leaves the studio. “Don’t be late.”

Hux blinks, furious. He seethes: _the audacity…!_

He sighs. Slowly, he goes about collecting his iPod, his sweatshirt, his phone, his water (taking a long, well-deserved drink, his lungs crying out.) He shuts off the studio lights and then leans against the wall to put his outdoor shoes on, rubbing the callouses on his warm, sore feet. He closes his eyes briefly, exhausted and angry, and thinks about Ren, about his insistence on doing things _his_ way, even after their tenuous agreement of the other day. _He could at least try to listen to me  — h_ _e said he wanted my expertise, for God's sake._

Jamming his hands in his pockets, Hux hurries down the stairs of the building, the door clanging shut behind him as he leaves. He stalks down the street to the métro — and the further he gets from the studio, the less he can ignore the feeling that what he is experiencing is not rage, but exhilaration.

 _When was the last time you danced like that, were challenged like that?_ Petipa and Balanchine are very well and good, but there are only so many ways you can spin _La_ _Bayadère_ or _Jewels._ Hux loves his company — loves dancing for them, teaching them, watching them improve to near-perfection — but _God,_ he has missed this. And dancing with Ren is like nothing he’s ever done before, nothing he’d ever imagined he _would_ do. He has never, certainly, wanted to murder any previous partner this badly; but he’s also never felt this kind of energy, this absolute _potential_ flowing through their bodies. Right now there is no understanding between them, this Hux knows for certain; but he feels, too, that once they _develop_ one —  _and we will, we will —_ they will create marvels.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song they dance to is [Ghost Lights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_uAicAjh8) by Woodkid.
> 
> Forgot to mention last week, but I am both [abernathae](http://abernathae.tumblr.com/) and [huxes](http://huxes.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr if you'd like to drop in and say hi! I'll be posting a link to this fic on my Star Wars blog every time it updates, and hey, if you're enjoying this so far, it'd be really cool if you [reblogged the post](http://huxes.tumblr.com/post/151490080651/alors-on-danse-chapter-2-kitseybarbours-star) and got the word out there. Thanks very much for the kudos and kind feedback so far. ❤️


	3. Chapter 3

*

Two weeks pass. March nears its close; the festival begins at the end of May. They have agreed, at Ren’s request, to rehearse five times a week, roughly five hours a day; the schedule is much less demanding than that of a normal ballet company, but Hux still finds himself coming home every night to his Rosemont flat and collapsing onto the couch at once. He sits there for a while, aching, not thinking, staring into space, until finally he drags himself to standing and goes through a round of stretches, sticks his legs up against the wall to drain them.

(They used to do this at the Royal Academy, when they had time between classes. The girls needed it more, with their poor feet, jammed into their pointe shoes, growing more swollen by the hour; Hux, a boy, who never had and never would dance en pointe, didn’t suffer quite the same. He’d always had more female friends than male — not that he’d had too many friends at all, mind — and the best time to catch up and gossip was just then, between classes. The girls quickly unlaced their shoes and sank to the floor, lying on their backs and propping their aching legs against the wall for just a few minutes of relief, before tying their ribbons up again and going back to class. That’s what Hux thinks of, now, alone on his back in his apartment — the companionship he’d never thought he’d miss so much: three or four or five of them lying on their backs, legs up like skinny trees, giggling and catching their breath and complaining of their hips, their feet, their knees — and loving every second of it, the pain and the weariness and all, for it was this that made them _dancers;_ and what was there to be that could ever be better than that?)

As Hux lays there with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, feeling the blood slowly make its way from his complaining feet all down his legs, he’ll usually try and muster the energy to go to yoga, or Pilates, or the gym. He’s developed a rotating but steady routine in the years he’s been living here, knowing he needs to keep up his fitness even when he isn’t dancing; but he finds, more often than not these days, that he can’t do it. _I’m dancing a lot,_ he consoles himself, _more than I do with l’Ordre. We’re busy all day; we have so much work to do…_ But it’s less the dancing, he knows, than Ren that exhausts him.

At some point Hux will scrape his tired body off the floor and drag himself to the kitchen, cook a high-protein, low-carb supper and then finally sit down on the couch again, with a book or a film or an episode of _Mad Men,_ and a glass of wine if it’s a Friday. He’ll ice any muscles or joints that need to be iced, heat any that need to be heated; most nights he runs a hot bath and sinks gratefully into it, pouring endless Epsom salts into the steaming tub. He goes to bed early, and sleeps deeply, without dreams.

(Mostly. Some nights, he dreams of Ren, or at least he _thinks_ it’s Ren: a dark, vivid presence, a dancer in red; harsh vicious movements, hands on his skin, and then a searing heat through his stomach, his groin —  _So maybe, then, it’s not Ren after all…)_

He wonders what Ren is doing — if when he’s not dancing he leads a quiet, solitary life like Hux’s own, or if (and this, he thinks, seems more likely) he fills his nights with wild parties, trading his slippers for street shoes and losing himself in a different kind of dance until dawn. He’s seen Ren, every morning for weeks now, showing up at erratic hours (ten-thirty seems little more than a pipe dream, in hindsight — Hux almost laughs to think he’d once hoped for punctuality), with a cigarette dangling from his long fingers and dark shadows staining his eyes. “Hello,” Hux will always say, and Ren will return the greeting with a grunt or a murmur, depending on the day. He'll unlock the door (Hux’s request for a key was met with a particularly blank, menacing stare that firmly discouraged him from asking again), and they'll climb the stairs together, Hux making idle chatter and Ren, again, saying little. He never wants anything from Starbucks, either.

So it’s easy for Hux to imagine a whole other, madcap life for Ren — drinking and dancing, maybe getting high all night, Montréal’s artsy darlings of all genders and genres hanging off his neck: begging to dance with him, touch him, be in the same room as him — just as Hux does and is every day. When he thinks this, one night in the bath, he colours, absurdly, and draws his knees into his chest. _It’s not the same. Of course it isn’t._

But still. Despite Hux’s vivid conjectures as to Ren’s “other” life, it strikes him that he hardly knows him — not really, anyway. He is coming to know his body, his movements, the thrumming energy that lies just beneath his skin: to know him as only a dance partner does. But every day, when he comes home exhausted after yet more frustrating hours in which they each vie for control and end up nowhere, he begins to think that if he only _knew_ him, they could make this work. There’s a barrier between them, and Hux grows determined to break it down, for he knows that only when it’s gone will they be able to astonish.

*

The days go by, and they do make some progress (on the dance front, at least), but it’s still not enough. On Wednesday of the third week, after a mostly peaceable morning, Hux asks Ren — thinking to begin his _getting-to-know-you_ project with something easy — “Would you like to come for lunch with me? My favourite sushi place is just a couple métro stops from here.”

Ren looks at him warily. Hux waits, sweater slung over his shoulder and phone in hand, smiling expectantly (already coming up with conversation topics and menu suggestions, simple stuff that can hopefully lead to something more); but then Ren shakes his head and says, flat as always, “No.”

Hux gives an inward sigh. _This isn’t going to be easy._ He knows better than to try again right now, though. “All right. See you in an hour.”

He eats his avocado roll and steamed edamame and smoked salmon sashimi in silence, thinking furiously. _What the hell do I have to do to make him talk to me?_

He doesn’t get his answer until Friday.

Wednesday afternoon and Thursday pass slowly; they seem to be dancing in molasses, fighting through their movements, unable to get in tune with each other or the music. Hux shoots down several of Ren’s suggestions, fed-up and unwilling to back down from his own ideas; and then he is met (unsurprisingly) with an equally stony reception from Ren when he comes up with modifications and new steps. They hurl harsh words back and forth, and, when they have to touch in the dance, hold far too tight, as if trying to bruise, to make their mark on each other — but then again, these days they seem to spend more time arguing than dancing.

With each hour that passes Hux wonders anew why they’re going through with this — why Ren, after his initial displeasure and threat of firing Hux, has now decided to keep him around, even though they clearly make a terrible team. _He said he admired me, but he doesn’t act like it at all._

He comes close to quitting many times. But something keeps him around, keeps him coming back to this dirty studio and to Ren; and that thing, of course, is the dancing. _I’ll never dance like this again,_ he knows, and reminds himself every single day. _I’ll never dance with anyone like him again._

Finally Friday comes: they both relish the thought of a two-day break from each other. But rehearsal runs late tonight. After a strange burst of synchrony and energy this morning, they’ve come close to finishing the piece — a near-miracle in itself; but they still can’t get the ending right. They have been here since ten-thirty, as usual, and though most days they end around three-thirty or four, today Ren insists that they keep going, keep going, keep going, until finally it’s after six and Hux calls it quits for the weekend.

“We’re done,” he says, as they end the piece-in-progress for the thousandth time today, neither of them happy with the final twenty-four counts or so. This most recent variation has not satisfied either of them, despite their (or at least Hux’s) best hopes. “That’s it. We’re not going to get anything else done tonight.”

Mercifully, Ren agrees. He breaks his posture and goes to the front of the room, towelling off with a doglike urgency and taking long, gulping drinks of water: they haven’t taken a break in hours. Hux follows him to his own pile of stuff and mirrors him, gasping as he takes several parched swigs. “God,” he says. “I’m knackered.”

Ren nods — the first time that they’ve been in agreement all day, or maybe even all month. He pulls the elastic from his hair and shakes it out around his face, his chest still heaving with exertion. “Fuck the last section,” he says with tired menace.

“We’ll get it on Monday,” Hux promises with no conviction at all. He’s frustrated. They’ve tried everything, or at least it feels like they have; Hux has offered some more traditional ballet steps and combinations, Ren’s contributions have been more contemporary — and nothing has worked. The problem, Hux is increasingly feeling, is not with the dancing, but with them. They aren’t in tune; they don’t know each other, as Hux had realised, at all; and they’ll never dance well together unless they do.

“Listen,” Hux says suddenly. “Let’s go for dinner.”

Ren, stuffing his shoes into his bag and searching for his phone, looks up. “What?”

“Let’s go out,” Hux repeats. “Take a break. Have some good food — it’s Friday, after all — and just…not be dancing for a while. What do you say?”

He’s expecting Ren to say no right away, just as he’d said no to Hux’s lunch invitation the other day. He’s already bracing for a rejection when, to his surprise, Ren gives a curt nod. “I know a place,” he says, and then turns and leaves the studio. Hux stands for a moment in stupefaction —  _make that_ two _things we’ve agreed on today —_ and then he follows him out the door and into the Montréal night.

*

The “place” Ren knows of turns out to be a swish, dim-lit Asian fusion place with lots of coloured glass and a pounding hipster soundtrack. As they step through the doors, Hux takes a look around and taps Ren’s elbow: “Are you sure we’re dressed for here?”

The rest of the clientele — all young professionals and their fashionable companions, as far as Hux can tell — are decidedly _not_ wearing sweat-soaked, worn-out dance clothes. But Ren waves a hand: “They know me here”, he says; and, sure enough, the smiling hostess appears from somewhere inside the bustling restaurant and calls Ren’s name with enthusiasm.

Hux watches in mild astonishment as Ren leans down and exchanges cheek-kisses with the girl, and then motions back to Hux —  _“Pour deux, s’il te plait,”_ he entreats, and his voice is warmer than Hux has ever heard it. The hostess beams at him and grabs two menus, leading them to a cosy back booth near the window. Ren thanks her, and she shoots a stellar smile at Hux as she leaves.

An unwelcome voice in the back of Hux’s head informs him, _It probably looks like you’re on a date;_ and apparently this voice is in Ren’s head too, because he glances up at Hux: “I’ve known Jessika since I was very young. My mother used to teach her, and she gets her season tickets for Résistance whenever they’re in town. She always gives us the best table when we’re here,” he informs him, expressionless.

“I see,” Hux says. He bends quickly to his menu so as to stop thinking — about what, he’s not quite sure. As he takes in the small, carefully-curated selection of dishes — fish dishes, salads and noodle bowls, several vegetarian options — he notices that Ren hasn’t even opened his menu. “Already decided?” he asks. 

Ren nods. “My usual,” he says, and it’s clear he’s not going to elaborate.

Hux nods, too. “Ah.”

They’ve nearly exhausted a round of pleasantries (Hux trying his hardest, Ren responding in a grumbling monotone: _the weather was all right today, did you hear so-and-so are coming to town, yes the tickets have all sold out already, a real shame isn’t it)_ when their waitress arrives to take their orders, dropping off two waters and a basket of prawn crackers with avocado dip. Hux is starving, but to be polite he doesn’t reach for the crackers until they’ve ordered. They both get a salad to start, and Hux has made up his mind on some sort of deconstructed shrimp curry that sounds intriguing more than anything — but when Ren orders, sounding bored, the seared mahi-mahi, Hux smiles up at the waitress and, without exactly knowing why, seconds his order. “The same for me, please,” he says, smiling smoothly. “Thank you.”

Ren raises his eyebrows and makes no comment.

“So,” Hux says once the waitress has gone, reaching gratefully for the crackers and swiping one through the dip. He decides to launch right into this whole getting-to-know-you scheme, like he’d planned to on Wednesday: “If you don’t mind me asking — why did you quit ballet?”

Ren is taking a drink of his water. He opens his eyes and frowns at Hux over the rim of his glass, seeming to take his time in swallowing; he sets it down and wipes his mouth. His response is whip-sharp: “What if I do mind you asking?”

“I’d like to know anyway.” Hux smooths his napkin onto his lap and smiles pleasantly at Ren.

Ren gives a small huff of annoyance. “I suppose you would.” He reaches for the cracker basket, and Hux passes him the dip before he asks for it. Ren scoops a huge dollop onto one fragile cracker and jams the entire thing in his mouth, chewing it roughly and forcing it down, chasing it with another swig of water before finally he speaks.

“It was Snoque’s fault.” At Hux’s confused look, Ren elaborates: “My choreographer and mentor. You would know him as S.”

“Oh. Yes, of course,” Hux says.

He’s seen pictures of the man: tall, taller even than Ren; his face ghostly pale, practically colourless — except for his eyes, which are cold and blue as a glacial lake. A horrid, deep, knotty scar disfigures his once-handsome face: a relic of the car accident that put a brutal end to his career, sending him into an early retirement and a new life as a dance teacher. He is (or _was,_ Hux realises; he doesn’t know if S. — _Snoque —_ is even still alive) a notoriously private man; he has only given one or two interviews since the accident, and those only in the last decade or so – since he started teaching Ben Solo, his pet project, his rising star.

They were often seen together when Ben still did ballet, at performances or else at formal events, Snoque chaperoning his young student as they toured around the world. There’s pictures of them on red carpets together, Ben looking strangely bashful in a tuxedo and tails, with Snoque a pale and almost sinister shadow at his elbow, guiding him, minding him. Over the years Hux has had several colleagues who’ve seen Ben dance, and they’ve reported having seen S. waiting in the wings at his performances: Ben hurrying to him as soon as the curtain fell; the two conferring, heads bent, S. frowning, delivering rapid, blistering criticisms, and Ben nodding, brows creased and eyes distant, but apparently hearing everything and taking it to heart.

 _It was…weird,_ a girl Hux used to partner admitted to him once, her freckled nose wrinkling. _Kind of creepy. Like S. owned him or something, you know?_

“He wouldn’t let me do what I wanted,” Ren begins simply. “When I was younger, I didn’t care: I was happy to do exactly as he taught me, whatever it was. But as I got older and wanted to branch out, to develop my own style and experiment with things, he just became more and more controlling.”

The waitress has returned shockingly soon with their salads: Hux wonders if it’s anything to do with the fact that they _know Ren here._ Ren falls silent as she places them in front of them, smiling sweetly at him —  _“Pour vous, m’sieur” —_ but saying nothing to Hux. Hux picks up his fork and spears a piece of endive. “Go on,” he entreats.

Ren picks up another puffy cracker and breaks it into pieces, his long fingers nervous. He pops one chunk into his mouth and puts the rest on his side-plate, ignoring his salad completely. “He always talked of his art as coming from a…force,” Ren says flatly. “Some kind of creative energy that only he possessed. He was using me, he said, as a vessel for that energy — an outlet, a final expression. He was crafting me in his image,” he says. “I existed, to him, only as a channel for his art — and his alone. I wasn’t allowed to think, to dance, for myself.”

Abruptly, after this unusual revelation, Ren goes silent again. He picks up his fork and starts stabbing at the salad, taking great unwieldy mouthfuls, getting dressing on his chin. Hux has the violent and unreasonable urge to wipe it off for him — but before he can act Ren has picked up his napkin and swiped it away. They continue like that for a little while, Ren attacking his salad and Hux neatly finishing his, laying his fork down on the empty plate when he’s done; and then finally he asks, “So what else?”

Ren looks up. He moves his fork without looking at it, tracing moody circles of dressing with the last piece of lettuce on his plate. “Is that not enough for you?”

“No,” Hux says simply. “If we’re going to dance together, we need to get to know each other.”

“Do you know the life stories of all your previous partners?” Ren bites back at once.

Hux nods. “As a matter of fact, I do.” He thinks for a moment: “Irina Rostov’s grandparents were imprisoned on suspicion of Communist activity in New York during the Cold War; Madeleine Mesquin has been in six car accidents; Peter Emory swears he’s seen his father’s ghost…” He ticks each person off on his fingers, stopping there although he’s had many more partners over the years. “Would you like me to keep going?”

Ren’s nose wrinkles. “I think you’ve made your point.” He drains his glass of water and then levels Hux with a watchful look. “That’s the only reason you want to know? Because you like to _get to know_ everyone you partner?” His words drip with acrid irony.

 _Of course not._  What he doesn’t know, however — and hopes Ren doesn’t either — is the exact reason he _does_ want to learn more about Ren.

“No,” Hux says coolly, “that’s not the only reason. But before you clam up again, I don’t want to sell your private life to the papers, either. We’ve been dancing together for a month now, and I realised — well, I just…I’d like to know you better,” he finishes somewhat lamely.

“Fine,” Ren says, giving in far more easily than Hux had expected.

Hux’s eyebrows rise. “Er — okay. That’s great —”

“But I hardly know you either. So. You talk too.”

Ren looks smug. This is his trump card, or so he thinks — but, (apparently unlike Ren), Hux hasn’t got an entire ballet career’s worth of dark and juicy secrets that he’s loath to spill to his new partner. His life and his dance career have been…good, and successful — more so than most, less so than some — and he’s not ashamed of much. Ren’s hard bargain is going to be easy. He smirks. “All right. I talk too.”

“And you go first.”

Hux takes a sip of his wine. “Fine.”  He clears his throat. “Well, what’s there to tell? — I was born in Dublin, I’ll be thirty-one in August, I trained at the Royal in London —”

“I know all of that already,” Ren interrupts. “Why did you move here? Why Montréal?”

“Cheaper than Paris but you still get the French,” Hux retorts archly. He shrugs. “I was tired of dancing _for_ people; I wanted to start my own company. Europe’s the old guard or nothing; out here they’re more receptive to new things, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So about four years ago I decided to go west, young man, and all that; and now here I am.” He takes a sip of his ice water. “Your turn.”

Ren’s eyes flick to Hux’s face and away again, almost as if he’d hoped Hux would have forgotten to ask him. For a moment Hux wonders if he’s making a mistake: if there’s something truly horrific in Ren’s past, something he won’t be able to look past in order to work with him — and then he wonders still more, as to what kind of horrible thing, exactly, would prove such a barrier — but then he thinks of Ren dancing, thinks of what he knows they can create together, and Hux decides he doesn’t care. _Anything. Anything would be worth it._

“So? What do you want to know?” Ren asks, a uniquely French sort of insolence colouring his tone. “Where I was born? My family?”

“If you’d like.”

“I was born in Montréal. I’m twenty-six. My mother is Léa Organa, as you know. My father’s name is Hans and he is a carpenter in California. They got divorced when I was three. My uncle Luc raised me while my mother was touring. He runs a charter school in the inner city, and his daughter Renée is like my little sister.”

After delivering this brief and deadpan (but still, somehow, affectionate) report, Ren folds his arms over his chest. _“C’est tout.”_

“My turn, again?” Hux decides to cooperate in the hope of encouraging Ren to do the same. The waitress arrives with their mahi-mahi as he's telling Ren about his days with the Opéra: the endless rehearsals, his tiny flat in the 8th arrondissement, living on black coffee and egg whites and, by some miracle, getting promoted out of the corps at the age of twenty-two.

“That’s remarkable, you know,” Ren interrupts him unexpectedly, after having been silent all this time.

Hux pauses midsentence, startled. “What is?”

“A promotion to soloist at such a young age. It’s almost unheard-of.”

 _Except with you, you mean._ Hux gives a little smile, flattered all the same: “Well, I suppose you’re right. Thank you.” He cuts off a small piece of fish and pops it in his mouth.

“That was the year you did _Starkiller,_ was it not?” Ren asks him. “You took a break from the Opéra and toured with it for a while.”

Hux is surprised. “Yes,” he answers, swallowing. “It was.”

“Why?” Ren asks him.

Hux pauses. “I’d always choreographed,” he answers slowly. “Just for myself. Never shared any of it; never thought I’d make it my whole career. But then that season, in Paris, I had the idea for that piece, and it...burned me up inside. I needed to create it, and share it with the world.” He thinks for a second: he has never before put these feelings into words, but somehow he knows exactly what to say. “I had to…make my mark.”

Ren nods. He seems to understand, as Hux had known he would.

“How did you know?” Hux asks. “That it was that year?”

Ren shrugs. “I’ve followed your career, somewhat,” he answers. “You piqued my interest a long time ago.”

“Oh,” Hux says, taken aback. “I see.”

Ren nods. His eyes are fixed on Hux’s face with a queer scrutiny that suddenly makes Hux uncomfortable. He clears his throat. “Enough about me,” he says with forced lightness, taking a swig of his water. “Tell me more about you.”

Ren makes no protest, this time, and as they eat, the conversation moves on to his own earlier days. He trained here, in town: Snoque moved to Québec to teach him, upon his mother’s insistence that he was too young to go to Snoque’s own studio in France. But when Ren turned fourteen, Snoque moved back to Paris with him, in order to begin his real career — despite Léa Organa’s objections.

“She never fully trusted Snoque, even after all the years he was my teacher,” Ren says, pushing mango salsa onto his forkful of rice with the flat side of his knife. “It seems strange to say this of a classical dancer, but she always thought he was too rigid, too set in the old ways — almost religious in his convictions about dance,” Ren explains, paraphrasing the opinions his mother has expressed to him (strong brows furrowed, dark eyes disapproving) over the years. “He refused to do anything new, anything remotely modern or different. A purist to the extreme — a bit of a fanatic.”

He pauses to pop the last of his fish in his mouth, and Hux shifts back slightly in his seat, all at once aware that he’d been leaning forward, elbows on the table, enraptured by the deep lilting cadence of Ren’s voice. He takes another sip of his wine: he doesn’t drink much, but when he’d asked Ren if he wanted to share a bottle of something, he’d gotten such an affronted look that he’d made up his mind and flagged down the waitress right away. (Ren’s expression has already been worth the $22-a-glass price tag.) He busies himself with arranging his utensils tidily on his now-empty plate, until Ren pushes his own away and says, “Your turn again.”

Hux looks up. “What? No! It was just getting interesting,” he protests without thinking. Ren raises his eyebrows. “Come on,” Hux insists, feeling his cheeks grow warm. “Your life is way more fascinating than mine. You can’t honestly want to hear about my excessively average early years at the Academy.” He thinks it must be the wine (which is excellent, really, he should write down the name) that makes him add, cheekily, “We can’t all be child prodigies, you know.”

But this, evidently, was quite the wrong thing to say — for Ren’s face darkens. “I was not a prodigy,” he says, and his tone is heavy with warning where it had been growing (almost, almost) comfortable before. “I just started young.”

“Starting young is one thing,” Hux argues, aware he shouldn’t be pushing it. “I’ve been dancing since I was four, and you didn’t see me getting scouted — no, _hand-picked_  — by one of the world’s best choreographers and then débuting in Paris before my fifteenth birthday.”

Ren’s eyes flash. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t as simple as being _scouted,”_ he says, his voice lower now, almost a hiss. “Snoque found me. Watched me. And he decided he had to… _have_ me,” he says, sounding disgusted. “He figured he was the only person who could bring out my full potential as a dancer: that no one else was good enough to teach me.

“But he didn’t only want to teach me. He wanted to use me, to _make_ me. He knew that I was still young enough to be moulded completely to his methods and his plans, so he stepped in and took over my training completely. My mother and my other teachers protested, but he silenced them. He wanted to control me,” Ren says simply. “And he did. For far too long.” His eyes narrow. “So you’ll forgive me, Huxley, if I take offense at being called a _prodigy.”_

Silence falls. Ren’s honesty is shocking, but Hux can sense, uneasily, that there is still more to the story. His face is warm: he picks up his near-empty glass and stares into it, swirls the remaining liquid round the bottom. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Mm.” Ren wipes his mouth with his napkin, puts it back down on the table. “Shall we get the bill?”

Hux pays. They go their separate ways home — Hux to the métro, Ren walking back to his apartment halfway across the neighbourhood. At home, as he packs his dance bag for tomorrow (throwing a sweater in the wash, finding a fresh pair of tights), Hux thinks about what Ren has told him — and still more about what he hasn’t.

What had happened, in those years in Europe (just five, if Hux recalls correctly: but five years of meteoric rise, a firework career), to make Ren speak so bitterly, to draw a veil over his eyes? He imagines a whole world of atrocities, ones he doesn’t even want to name, and he hopes, with a kind of guilty paranoia, that what Ren’s been through is _nothing like that, or that, or that. It can’t be._

Hux climbs into bed and turns out the light, and Ren’s words still reel through his head. He finds himself staring at the ceiling for a long, long time before he falls asleep.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As last week, [here's](http://huxes.tumblr.com/post/152145911371/alors-on-danse-chapter-3-kitseybarbours-star) the link to this chapter on my Star Wars blog, which it'd be super rad of y'all to reblog; and [here's](http://abernathae.tumblr.com/) my main blog too, if you'd like. Thanks again, so much, to everyone who's left kudos and/or feedback so far!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this week: mentioned child abuse (non-sexual). Read safely, my loves!

*

Hux’s Saturday is uneventful. He does the dishes and a load of laundry, walks to a smoothie place he likes for a late breakfast, spends a while browsing round a bookstore but leaves empty-handed: _The Goldfinch_ is waiting on his night-stand, his bookmark — barely eighty pages in — taunting him daily. He goes to a hatha flow class and then goes home and takes a shower, heats up leftover lentil soup for lunch. He stretches and does a warm-up, barefoot and without music, at the barre he installed on the empty wall of his living room when he first moved in.

He sends a text to Caroline. It’s been a few weeks since they’ve gotten together, and he wants to tell her all about Ren and the hellish times they’ve been having; but she doesn’t text back. She is, Hux realises, probably out with the girl she’s been seeing — Marianne, one of l’Ordre’s physios — and so he doesn’t text again, not wanting to disturb them with his own trivial…boy problems.

He wrinkles his nose, shakes his head. _That’s not what it is. Not at all. Work problems, more like; colleague problems…That’s all we are, is colleagues._

Colleagues. Hux stares at his phone.

Colleagues can text each other if they’re bored, can’t they? Colleagues can see each other on the weekend, on a Saturday night. Hux used to go bar-hopping or dancing or strolling in the Tuileries with his fellow company members in Paris, didn’t he? Surely he can text Ren. Make plans, maybe. Go for a drink or something. _It’s no different._

He sits down on the couch, unlocks his phone and finds Ren’s contact — his company email, and the cell number he gave him during their first week together, which Hux hasn’t called or texted since. He can’t actually remember if he gave Ren _his_ number: he’d had to prod Ren for his and hadn’t wanted to push it. Before he can lose his nerve, he types out what he hopes is a casual, cordial first text:

_Hello Ren, it’s Brendon Huxley. Not sure if you have my number?_

He pauses for a moment, and then he types without thinking, not knowing what he’s going to say until he’s said it.

_I was just thinking you might like to come round mine for supper tonight, if you’re not doing anything, that is. I was planning on cooking and thought maybe you’d like to swing by._

It’s perhaps less cool and composed than he’d have liked, but if he takes time to revise it he’ll end up deleting it all. He sends it. And then he sets his phone firmly on the coffee table, face-down. _Where did that come from?_

He wasn’t actually planning on cooking — getting something unhealthy delivered was looking pretty good —  _but…I can. I’ll just go to the store and get some stuff, maybe a bottle of wine…_ He glances to the counter and finds a half-empty bottle of white. Something tells him Ren drinks red. _I should have asked._

Hux squares his feet hip-width apart on the floor and drums his fingers on his thighs, resisting the urge to see if Ren’s texted back. He still feels a little dazed from what he’s done, as if he’d temporarily left his body, been taken over by some alien force that does _not_ want to strangle Kylo Ren, but wants, maybe, to do other things to him, with him —

_Shut up, Hux. Aliens aren’t real._

After what must _surely_ be ten minutes of this self-induced torment, but is probably about two-and-a-half, he stands up briskly and goes back to the barre. He turns music on this time — a gritty, electronic French dance song that really doesn’t fit the long, controlled movements of his exercises, but that distracts him from hearing, or thinking he hears, the vibration of his phone — or the lack of it.

He checks again after about twenty minutes have passed. Nothing. He ignores the tiny deflated feeling in his chest.

Hux goes and fetches his book from the bedroom and settles in on the couch. He reads for an hour or so, and checks his phone again: nothing. He reads for another hour. Nothing. By now it’s nearing suppertime. He’s going to have to eat, Ren or no Ren; so he puts in his bookmark (he’s read nearly a hundred pages; _that’s something, at least),_ and then heads out to get groceries.

He picks up the ingredients for a mushroom-stuffed chicken dish that he likes, plus some berries and two litres of milk and a fresh box of green tea, and then on an impulse grabs a box of ancient-grains spaghetti, a jar of organic primavera sauce, and some arugula and goat cheese and walnuts for a salad. And a bottle of Shiraz. _Just in case._ He pays and walks home through the cooling evening, his reusable canvas grocery bags swinging at his sides and the city nightlife beginning to emerge around him. He didn’t bring his phone.

At home there’s still nothing from Ren, but Caroline’s texted back, apologising — she’d been out with Marianne, as expected. Hux suggests they go for coffee sometime in the coming week —  _I have so much to tell you, you won’t even believe —_ and then gets to cooking supper for one.

He eats, washes the dishes by hand, watches two episodes of _Mad Men_ and then checks his phone one last time before plugging it in in the kitchen, as usual; he doesn’t like having it in his room when he’s trying to sleep. He gets ready for bed and climbs under the covers, and tries not to be irritated or disappointed by Ren’s lack of a response.

 _It’s hardly surprising,_ he reasons. _Even assuming he_ does _have my number and_ did _get the text, why on earth would I think he’d text back? Or want to come over, for that matter? Just because we went for dinner once doesn’t mean he wants to…hang out again. Or ever._ He shuts his eyes hard, embarrassed. _Enough_ _. You’re acting like a teenager, for God’s sake,_ he scolds himself.

Hux rolls over onto his side and wills himself, hard, to fall asleep, until finally he does, thoughts of Ren still teasing him as he slips into dreams.

*

Hux wakes up late, after ten — Sundays he lets himself sleep in. He pisses, washes his face, brushes his teeth in a lazy haze, his muscles aching pleasantly from a week of dancing and yesterday’s yoga. Over his pyjamas he throws on a worn-out touristy sweatshirt from Paris: he and Caroline bought matching ones when, improbably, in the same casting, they both got promoted to Opéra soloists. She’d grinned, pulling hers on over platinum curls (her hair was long in those days): “So we’ll always have Paris!”

Hux smiles at the memory, combing his fingers through his hair and forgoing a shower for now. _It’ll happen at some point._ He has no plans, other than maybe watching one (or two or three) of the documentaries from his Netflix queue or reading some more of his book _._ He did his exercise, his shopping, his laundry yesterday — and he decided on Friday night that, since Ren’s agreed to work on this dance as _equals_ , Hux doesn’t have to spend his own weekend time coming up with choreography; so he’s off the hook for that, too, and today he can just relax. It’s nice, this, the solitude — and, most of all, the lack of Ren.

 _Ren._ Hux remembers, as he ambles into the kitchen with the vague aim of making an omelette, the text he sent last night. Involuntarily, his face flushes. He casts a glance at his phone, charging innocently on the table, and — absurdly — his heart rate picks up. Through his ridiculous embarrassment he still rolls his eyes at himself: _How old are you, anyway?_

He picks up his phone and turns it on.

**1 new message: _Ren_**

He hadn’t known what to call Ren in his contacts. _Kylo Ren_ felt ridiculous, and he’s never been told to call him Ben, so simply _Ren_ it was — and he never actually thought he’d see his name come up, anyway. But now here it is, and all at once Hux can see his plans for a quiet, peaceful day evaporating in front of him. He swallows hard and unlocks his phone.

 **_Ren –_ ** **Received Sun 1:37 a.m.  
** _What time?_

Hux sets down his phone and blinks a couple times, incredulous. That’s it. Just two words, a question — no _sorry for the late reply,_ no _I had plans,_ no _absolutely not, who do you think you are…_ Just this, “What time?”, as if the offer still stands nearly twenty-four hours later.

It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. Most _normal_ people, with a single polite bone in their body, would apologise, and offer some explanation, and then maybe try to reschedule, or _something:_ not blindly, arrogantly assume they’re still welcome. Ren, however, is not one of those people.

And, Hux realises, the offer _does_ still stand. He’d texted because he had no other plans last night; he has none tonight either. He bought stuff for dinner, for Christ’s sake (he casts an accusatory glance at the Shiraz on the counter, as if all this is its fault.) And, against all odds and his better judgment, he finds that he does actually want to have dinner with Ren.

He picks up his phone.

_Is six o’clock okay?_

Ren texts back in minutes.

_Yes._

Hux sits down in a kitchen chair and takes a deep breath. After a moment he gets up, opens the fridge, and cracks two eggs for his omelette, slicing off a thick slab of butter to fry it in, because _Jesus, I deserve it._ He cooks and eats it quickly, without tasting it, and then he heads to the shower, feeling distinctly unsettled.

 _This is either the best or the worst decision I’ve ever made,_ he thinks as he lathers up his hair. _Should I cancel?_ he wonders, towelling off. Shaving, he debates going to get his phone and sending Ren a scathing text, _You know what, actually, that’s not really how social engagements work, you can’t just RSVP after the fact…_ As he dresses (dark jeans and a button-down shirt, the collar impeccably straight), he sighs. He’s not going to cancel and he knows it. _Maybe Ren will,_ he thinks hopefully — but even as he does, he knows he doesn’t want him to, not really.

He does manage to read one long chapter of _The Goldfinch,_  even watches a film with lunch. But all day he’s antsy, checking his phone every few minutes, half-anxious and half…something else. Finally, unable to sit around for any longer, pretending tonight is nothing special, around four Hux starts cooking.

He ties on an apron and plays music from his computer, humming along to Death Cab and the National as he boils water and opens the jar of sauce, measures out pasta for two and washes the arugula mix. He stirs a dollop of olive oil into the pasta as it cooks; the music changes to the Muse song Ren danced to that first day. Hux’s face grows warm, and not just from the steam. He lays down his spoon and crosses to the computer to quickly skip past the offending track.

Since he’s already away from the stove, he picks up his phone and steals another furtive peek. (He’s proud of himself for not having checked it in…twenty minutes or so.) There’s nothing from Ren, just some spam emails and a reminder to ask Émilie, one of his corps girls, how her fractured ankle is doing. Hux swallows a flutter of disappointment and goes briskly back to the stove, grasping his wooden spoon as fiercely as if it were a dagger. _You’re being ridiculous._

The pasta finishes cooking far too early, even before five. Unable to face the prospect of sitting around trying not to think about Ren — and then thinking about _why_ he’s trying not to think about Ren, and then thinking about _that,_ etc., etc. — Hux decides to pop out and pick up something for dessert. He takes the métro to a little bakery nearby and, after careful consideration, decides on a chocolate torte that should be a safe enough bet, and will go nicely with the wine besides. When he gets home, he finds he’s chewed up sufficient time — and, shockingly, that Ren has texted.

 **_Ren –_ ** **Received 5:21 p.m.  
** _Your address?_

Again with the two-word questions. Hux isn’t surprised that Ren over text is just as brusque and peculiar as Ren in real life. He gives him his address and tells him which train to take, and Ren says, _On my way._

 _This is it. This is really happening._ Hux can’t shake the nagging feeling that this whole dinner was a horrible idea. He takes a breath and massages his temples, and then goes quickly to fix up the salad, get out the wine glasses, set the table for two.

The buzzer sounds at precisely 6:01. Hux has just set the homemade balsamic vinaigrette on the table. He takes off his apron, his heart pounding, and wipes his hands on the dishtowel before hurrying to the intercom: “Hello?” he says, trying to sound composed.

“It’s me,” says Ren, gruff and unmistakable.

“I’ll buzz you up, hang on.”

Three flights of stairs later Hux is opening the door to find Kylo Ren on the threshold.

Hux has never seen Ren in anything but dance clothes. He’d never given much particular thought to what he’d wear outside of the studio, but seeing him now, he can’t imagine him in anything else. Ren’s dark hair is loose around his shoulders, where Hux has only ever seen it pulled back into a bun: it's wavy and thick and longer than Hux had expected. His black blazer hangs perfectly, tailored to his broad shoulders and overlarge biceps, the lapels flat against his well-muscled chest. Under this, he wears (and Hux almost smiles, at this) a white-and-pink concert shirt for a Montréal band from the 90s that Hux likes too, well-worn and soft-looking, the logo fading with time. His jeans, too, are black, and he wears his usual scuffed-up Docs — except they aren’t so scuffed, tonight. Is it just Hux’s imagination, or do they look like they’ve been _polished,_ even? Hux’s stomach gives a ridiculous little flutter at the thought.

Ren looks great. _He looks…well, he looks like Ren._

“Hi,” Hux says. He gives a quick smile. “Come on in.”

Ren does. He looks too big and too dark for Hux’s blond-wood-and-linen apartment. “I brought wine,” he says, still gruff, as Hux shuts the door behind him.

And sure enough, he did: he holds it up and Hux glances at the label, recognises it as the white he’d been drinking at the Asian place the other night. He swallows, oddly touched.

“Thanks,” Hux says, his voice sounding high and awkward in his own ears. “Er — here.” He takes the bottle from Ren. “Can I take your coat?” he offers.

Ren shakes his head. He bends to untie his Doc Martens and places them, silently and with childlike, uncharacteristic care, on the mat next to the door; and then he looks up at Hux with his eyebrows slightly raised, as if waiting for instruction.

“All right,” Hux says. “Um — follow me, then.”

He leads Ren into the kitchen, hearing his heavy, sock-footed, unfamiliar tread on the creaky floorboards. “Can I get you a drink?” Hux asks, setting the wine on the counter next to the bottle of Shiraz (which wasn’t cheap by any stretch, but might as well be from a gas station now.) “Wine? Water? Tea? I’ve not got much in the way of pop or alcohol,” he apologises.

“Wine is fine.” Ren has taken a seat in one of the spindly-legged Ikea bar-stools at the counter, his bulky frame hardly able to squeeze in.

“Red or white?”

“Red.”

Hux feels a glimmer of triumph as he pours for them both — red for Ren, white for himself _— I was right, then._ He passes by the computer and surreptitiously turns the music down, and then gestures to the table. “Have a seat, if you’d like — I’ve just got to toss the pasta with the sauce and then we’ll be good to go.”

He smiles, feeling forced; Ren merely nods and extracts himself from his stool, going to sit at the table, where he looks much more comfortable in one of the broad-backed vintage chairs. Hux tosses the pasta and then brings the serving dish to the table, indicating that Ren serve himself first, busying himself adding goat cheese and chopped walnuts to the arugula mix. “Hope this is all okay,” Hux says. “Nothing fancy, sorry.”

“It’s no problem,” Ren answers. _We’ve moved past monosyllables, at least._

“Great.”

They serve themselves, and eat in silence for a little while, the Fleet Foxes providing soft accompaniment to the noise of clinking utensils, the gentle knock of glasses on the table-top. “Everything all right?” Hux asks anxiously after a bit, feeling himself that the vinaigrette is too acidic, worrying that the pasta could use some salt; but Ren nods, twirling spaghetti on his spoon.

“It’s very good.”

Hux is surprised: “Oh — thanks,” he says with a smile.

“Thank you for having me,” Ren says. He sounds almost ashamed. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier. I was out of town yesterday — I had to leave in…something of a hurry, and I forgot to pack a phone charger.” He bends again over his plate, manoeuvring walnuts and cheese onto a forkful of salad. “You’re very kind to change your plans for me,” he adds unexpectedly.

Hux frowns. “I had no plans,” he assures him, strangely touched once more. But something in Ren’s tone concerns him. “A hurry?” he asks lightly. “Is everything all right?”

Ren starts to nod — and then stops, as if thinking better of it. Slowly, he shakes his head. “Not exactly.” He doesn’t elaborate. He takes a long sip of his wine. “This is good,” he comments, evasive.

“It’s organic,” Hux tells him, and feels stupid as soon as he does. He takes a delicate mouthful of pasta and waits, watching Ren, waiting for him to say more but not wanting to press him.

After a few moments he does speak again — but it’s not what Hux wanted to hear.

“I had some ideas for the piece,” Ren says. “A sequence that would end it nicely — an extension of the pas de deux. Some lifts.”

“Oh,” Hux says, surprised that Ren’s been thinking about the piece at all. “Excellent.”

“We’ll try them tomorrow. You might need some practise,” Ren says — and it doesn’t sound like a dig, for once. He explains further: “I don’t think it’s a style you’re used to.”

“All right,” answers Hux, genuinely stunned by Ren’s cordiality. Where is the sulking, the sarcasm, the sullen silence of the studio? “I’m glad you’ve got something in mind, cause I’ve been rather at a loss myself,” he confesses, smiling regretfully. “I don’t know what it is about the last section, but nothing’s coming together.”

Ren nods. “I know. I feel the same.” He scrapes up a last bite of salad, wipes his mouth and reaches for the tongs. “More?”

“Oh — no, thanks,” Hux declines, strangely flustered by the gesture. Ren takes seconds of the salad, dresses it liberally; Hux notices that the portion he’s taken is heavy on walnuts and cheese, which is peculiarly endearing, obviously purposeful. “You’re sure everything’s good?” he asks again.

“Very good,” Ren repeats. And he smiles, just barely. Their eyes meet, and then Hux looks away, taking a long drink of his wine and then pouring some more. He offers the red to Ren, who declines (his glass is still half-full.) And then he decides he has to ask.

“So — did something happen yesterday?” he begins tentatively. “To call you out of town?”

Ren looks up. He doesn’t seem surprised, exactly — in fact, he seems almost to have been expecting the question, and steels himself now to reply. “Yes,” he says, and the word is heavy. “I suppose so.”

“Do you mind if I ask —?”

“I went to court,” Ren says. Hux’s eyes must widen, his eyebrows rise, because Ren looks at him and adds, a trace of black humour in his voice —  _I know what you’re thinking —_ “It wasn’t my trial.”

“Whose was it?” Hux asks, his voice catching strangely in his throat. Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this.

“Snoque’s.” Utterly calm, Ren takes another bite of pasta.

_“Snoque’s?”_

Ren swallows, nods. “Yes. He’s living in Ottawa, and he has been ill, so the proceedings are taking place out there. It’s been going on for some months…” He frowns. “A year, I suppose, by now.” He gives a slight shrug, and Hux frowns, shocked: _A year?!_ “They needed me back sooner than expected. I had to leave town in a hurry,” Ren explains.

“Was that why you scheduled our rehearsals that way, then? And requested that time off? For the...trial?” Hux asks slowly, pieces falling into place.

Ren had asked for a week off at the beginning of May — a request which had irritated Hux immensely: crunch time is no time for a vacation — but now he understands. And Ren confirms it with a nod. “They said I’d be called to give testimony — again — around that time, but things moved more quickly than planned.” His eyes shift. “On that note: yesterday, they said they’d need me back there tomorrow morning as well. I hate to ask on such short notice, but we’ll have to cancel our session.”

Hux nods, not fully understanding the situation, but deducing from the serious look on Ren’s face that this is not a request but a necessity. “Of course — yes, of course.”

(He wonders, briefly, why — if Ren had been needed in Ontario both yesterday and tomorrow — he had not simply spent all weekend there. The answer comes to him, but he cannot entirely believe it: _He came back to see me.)_

Ren says, “Thank you.”

“What do they need you to give testimony for?” Hux asks — quieter now, sensing that they’re approaching a delicate subject. He half-fears that Ren will shut down, or else stand up and storm out, and they’ll never speak of this again; but instead, he pushes away his empty plate and looks Hux in the eye.

“Huxley,” he begins —

“Call me Hux,” Hux interrupts without thinking. Ren frowns. “It’s been long enough, don’t you think?” Hux explains himself, embarrassed. Ren gives a small shrug.

“Hux,” he repeats experimentally. “Can I trust that nothing I tell you here will be — repeated?” Ren looks uncomfortable, now. “This trial, it’s a…sensitive time for my family, and especially for me.” His eyes flick back and forth. “And — well — Snoque has always kept to himself. News of his illness has not been made public, and of course the trial has been kept under wraps, too,” he adds quickly, seeming to rush to Snoque’s defence, as if Hux had spoken out against him. “He —  _we —_ would prefer it if neither of those things were made known to the dance world or to the press.” His napkin is still in his hand; he fidgets with it, waiting for Hux’s reply.

“Of course,” Hux hears himself say. “Of course you can trust me. I’ll — I won’t say anything to anyone, I promise.” He understands Ren’s trepidation, but feels stung, still, just a little. _Did he really think_ — _?_

Ren relaxes. “Thank you.” He sighs, and then he speaks.

“My parents — my mother in particular — and I have decided to press charges of abuse against Snoque, because of how he treated me as a child.”

Hux’s stomach gives a lurch. In his conjectures as to Ren’s past, he’d thought of this, or something like it, but hadn’t really believed it might be true. He feels slightly sick, and is about to ask, not wanting to know –

“It’s not what you think,” Ren is quick to add on seeing his expression. “Nothing — like that.” He swallows. “He…favoured physical punishment, harsh ‘corrections’, if you will. And he…well. I didn’t dance like a child, so he never felt the need to speak to me like one,” he says. “He could be…very strict, at times. Unkind.” He pauses. “Cruel. And all in the name of his art — of making me the best I could be.” There is a soft, sad, bitter edge to his tone.

“That’s sick.” Hux speaks up, his voice constricted. “That’s — twisted. Jesus, Ren, that’s…that’s not right. He shouldn’t’ve — God. That’s not right.”

Ren inclines his head. “No. But I was too young to know any different, to remember what it was like to be taught by anyone but him — and by the time I realised that something was not as it should have been, I was too scared of him to speak up. Exactly as he wanted.”

Again, he states the facts simply, without anger or sadness in his voice — but Hux can see in his eyes a weariness, a kind of heavy sorrow, built up over years. “What changed?” he asks. “When did you realise?”

And here Ren gives the ghost of a smile. “It sounds silly,” he says, his mouth turning up slightly. “One time, when I was probably twelve years old, Snoque had to go out of town for a conference, or a gala or something, I don’t remember now. We couldn’t have our lessons, then, of course, but he insisted that I not be idle in his absence. So I went with my cousin Renée to her tap class.

“I saw how her teacher talked to the students. She was firm with them — she knew, obviously, they wouldn’t improve unless she was honest about their failures, their weaknesses; but she was always kind. She didn’t blame them for her mistakes; she told them, instead, how to correct them, and showed them how to do it if they didn’t understand. She never said they were _useless,_ or _worthless,_ or would never make anything of themselves without her guidance…” Ren gives another tight, nearly apologetic half-smile. “I suppose it was then that I realised that Snoque’s methods weren’t exactly the norm.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hux says quietly. “How old were you when —?” he asks, and then stops himself: “It doesn’t matter. You were so young. Too young.”

“I was six when he took over my training. He only stopped teaching me when I joined la Résistance at the age of nineteen.” Ren gives a bleak smile. “Thirteen years.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hux says again. For a dancer, thirteen years can be half a lifetime. He doesn’t know what to say, what to do; he toys with his cutlery, laying it down on his plate and pushing it away from him as Ren had done. He swallows. There is a silence, and then —

“Ren,” he says. Ren is looking down at his lap, seeming to have withdrawn back into himself.

Ren looks up.

“Do you have — someone?” Hux asks, his voice not sounding like his own. “To help you through this? Your cousin, maybe, or even just a friend, or — or a girlfriend?” he asks. The words feel hopelessly forced. And then he adds, (hating that he does, that he’s trying to find this out now, of all times), “Or a boyfriend? Anyone?”

Ren’s eyes register surprise. He says nothing for a moment. A palpable tension stretches between them, and Hux feels ready to sink into the floor, to dissolve into a pillar of salt, anything to take back what he’s said — and then Ren says, “No.”

Hux blinks.

Ren corrects himself: “Well — not exactly. My family are all here; Luc and Renée have arranged a hotel in Ottawa for all of us, my mother has taken time off from teaching, and my father has come up from the States.” He pauses. “But as for…anyone else,” he says, and the words are deliberate and careful, “there is — no one.”

Hux’s pulse pounds beneath his skin. His next words tumble from him. “If you need someone,” he says, too fast, stumbling, “to come with you, to be there, to — help in any way,” he says, “I would be happy to.”

Ren meets his gaze, holds it. His lips part; he shakes his head. He says, “This is — I need to do this alone.” He draws his bottom lip into his mouth, just slightly. His jaw is firmly set. “But thank you for the offer,” he says, and for once it sounds like he means it. “I appreciate it.”

Hux nods numbly. “You’re welcome,” he says. But he feels a sudden urgency, and repeats, more fervent now: “I mean it, Ren. Anything you might need — if you need to talk about things, or — or just scream at someone, or something, I don’t know, _anything —_ I’m here. Whenever.”

There is a glimmer of humour, or something like it, in Ren’s dark eyes now. The corners of his mouth lift almost imperceptibly. “Thank you, Huxley.” He corrects himself: _“Hux.”_

Hux smiles weakly too, suddenly exhausted. He rises and collects his dishes, holding out his hand for Ren’s too. “Ah — shall we have dessert?”

The torte goes over well. They each have some more wine, and their talk turns to lighter things — what sort of costumes will work for the piece, what lighting, backdrops. Ren explains in more detail the ideas he’d mentioned earlier, and Hux listens intently, nodding often: he can picture the new segment and agrees that it will, in all likelihood, be just what they need. He thanks Ren profusely for putting in the time, and in response Ren gives him a smile that is almost shy. A gentle warmth blooms in Hux’s blood.

It’s nearly eleven by the time Hux looks at his watch (Longines Heritage Collection, a very expensive gift to himself after the closing of _Starkiller_ ’s hugely successful first run), and exclaims, “Jesus, it’s late!”

“What time?” Ren enquires.

“Ten-forty-five,” Hux tells him.

Ren rises from his chair at once. “I’ve overstayed my welcome,” he says at once, suddenly stiff and formal again. “I should go.”

“No — that’s not what I meant,” Hux backtracks hurriedly; “only that you’re leaving in the morning, aren’t you?”

“Not until ten,” Ren says, giving a half-shrug that is much more like the Ren Hux had met that very first day. “But still. You’re right, it’s late.”

“ _Un_ _dernier_ _verre_ _pour la route?”_ Hux suggests in a rush: a last-ditch and unexpected attempt to get him to stay.

But Ren shakes his head. _“Non, merci,”_ he says, and his voice is gentler than Hux has known it to be. Hux accepts defeat.

Ren makes his way to the front door, and after a moment Hux gets up and goes after him. Ren is already lacing up his boots. “Thank you for having me,” Ren says, straightening up. “You cook very well. I had a very nice evening,” he tells him, and Hux is still not used to this sincerity.

“Thank you for coming,” Hux replies, and for the thousandth time in their acquaintance feels his cheeks grow hot. “I had a good night as well. Good luck in Ottawa tomorrow,” he adds hastily. “And if you need anything —”

“I know,” Ren interrupts. He smiles, looking tired. _“On se voit mardi matin,”_ he says decisively.

And then, before Hux can react, he’s leaning in, brushing air-kisses first to one cheek, then the other.

Hux, dumbfounded, half-kisses back — Ren smells of something sharp and dark; his cheeks are still smooth from this morning’s shave — and then Ren pulls back, nods brusquely, and says, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Hux says, raising a stunned hand in farewell; and then he is alone again, stupefied and reeling.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ren's Look™ in this chapter was heavily influenced by [Wir träumen uns beide wach](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5831524), by [acroamatica](http://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica) and [ CyanideBreathmint](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint). Thanks to you both for letting me borrow your fashion sense! (The band on Ren's shirt, if anyone was wondering, is Bran Van 3000.)
> 
> I would like to apologise to the Canadian legal system for the great creative liberties I have taken, and will continue to take, with, y'know, the way it actually works and stuff. On the same note, thanks very much to [ hux-you-up](https://hux-you-up.tumblr.com/), who answered my uneducated questions, gave me some great advice which I mostly ignored, and flattered me very highly by asking if I was in law school! (I'm so not.)
> 
> The song Hux warms up to at the barre is [Noir désir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHmvSEGYP2k&) by Vive la Fête (the lyrics are _very_ Kylo Ren); as I was getting this ready to post, I realised that [Sorrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6p_qe45miY) by the National is _also_ very Ren-in-this-chapter. (Incidentally, it is also just a beautiful song. Please listen to the National.)
> 
> Finally, as usual, [here's](http://abernathae.tumblr.com/) my main blog, and [here's](http://huxes.tumblr.com/post/152726112436/alors-on-danse-chapter-4-kitseybarbours-star) a link to this chapter on my Star Wars blog, if you're feeling so inclined. Everyone who's been reblogging and spreading the word already — I read, and am continually delighted by, all of your tags. Thank you. ❤️


	5. Chapter 5

*

When he had made plans with Caroline for Monday evening, Hux had never imagined he’d have this much to tell her.

After Ren left late last night, Hux had cleaned up the kitchen in a daze and then gone to bed almost at once, simultaneously too wired and too drained to stay awake any longer. He’d woken up with his usual dance-day alarm, having forgotten to turn it off even though they’d cancelled, and then spent a lazy, pensive morning in bed, turning last night’s conversation over and over in his mind.

At ten o’clock, he glanced out the window in the vague direction of the Gare Centrale and imagined Ren getting on his train, spending the two-hour ride doing — what? Going over notes, testimonies, reliving the most painful parts of his past, preparing to dredge them all up again for an audience…and all this, alone.

He had felt such a surge of sadness at this that he’d squeezed his eyes shut, suddenly overcome, and then gotten out of bed at once, fed-up with himself for languishing here while Ren went through such an ordeal. He’d done a barre, showered, dressed, done housework and read (biding his time where he would have been dancing), kept himself busy until it was time to meet Caro; but he couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt, and at every moment he wondered, _What’s Ren doing now? And is he all right?_

Just after four-thirty, Hux finds a table tucked away in the back corner of the café where he and Caroline have arranged to meet. As he stands in line for a lemon tart and a green tea, he checks his phone several times, half-expecting — as he has been all day — a text from Ren that hasn’t come. He gets his order and returns to his seat; he shoves his phone back in his pocket and tells himself Ren’s doing fine.

“Caro!” Hux calls, standing and waving when he sees her, a few minutes later, coming in the door. His best friend spots him at once and breaks into a grin, one that Hux feels mirrored on his own face in an instant. She starts to wend her way through the crowded café, her height and strength making it easy for her to muscle out a path, apologising charmingly all the while.

“Hello, you!” she coos when she reaches the tiny table, dropping her stuff in a heap and pulling him in for a hug. They kiss each other’s cheeks, smiling, and Caroline says, mournful and teasing, “How is it that we can live in the same city for _months_ and never ever see each other?”

“I think we actually spent _more_ time together when you were still in London,” Hux responds in kind, feeling some of his melancholy lifting at once. He beams at Caro as they take their seats. Hux gestures to his tea: “Do you want anything? Still drinking those disgusting triple-syrup extra-whip white mochas or whatever?”

“Of course,” Caro twinkles at him, and Hux, sighing dramatically, goes off to procure one for her. “Thank you, _mon_ _cher_ _!”_

Drinks acquired, they settle in to talk. Hux senses immediately that Caro knows something’s up with him. Her eyes are already glimmering with the particular mischief that had accompanied all their late-night talks in Paris, usually about new lovers (Caro’s) or new rivals (Hux’s); and Hux is both rather pleased and terrifically anxious to be the one with the _amourette_ this time —  _if that’s even what this is._

He considers, for one wild moment, backing off and only telling her about the dancing — glossing over that first unexpected dinner, the things Ren had told him then, and the new and different tension between them last night, culminating in the _bises_ at the door. But he knows there’s no way to disentangle these things: the dancing and the _everything else_ are sides of the same coin, unable to exist without each other.

“So,” Caro says, strong hands wrapped around her drink, sharp eyes alight. “This new partner of yours. _Kylo Ren,”_ she intones, drawing the syllables out with drama. “What’s he like?”

Hux swallows a sip of his drink and raises his eyebrows nervously. _Here we go._ “Like someone took the interpersonal skills of a three-year-old,” he says, trying to sound dry and blasé, “and put them in a man who’s about six-foot-two and built like a freight train.”

Caro’s eyebrows arch too, her lips quirking up. She looks impressed already. But Hux isn’t done: he holds up a finger before she can open her mouth.

“Temper aside, though, he dances like nothing you’ve ever seen, swear to God. He’s…brilliant. He’s ridiculous.” Hux swallows. “He doesn’t dance like _Ben Solo_ anymore, not really, but his technique is still there, the foundations…He’s a genius. Certifiable.” He finds he can’t stop talking; there’s nothing to do but dive in. “And,” he adds, the words spilling out of his mouth, “he’s…well, he’s gorgeous.”

 _“Ahhh.”_ Caroline nods wisely, a grin playing on her lips. “There’s the rub.” She squirms a little further into her cushy armchair and takes a sip of her drink, getting comfortable, settling in to hear the whole story. “All right, then. Why don’t we start from the beginning?”

So Hux tells her everything.

The strangeness of their first meeting; watching Ren dance for the first time; Ren’s initial insolence followed by their unusual agreement. The start they had made, and then the hours and days of frustration and failure. Their first dinner, at the Asian place, where Ren had told Hux so much more than he’d expected — out of respect for Ren’s privacy, Hux skims over the details, telling Caro only that he quit ballet because S. demanded too much of him. (Caro raises her eyebrows at this, but thankfully says nothing.)

“And then after that dinner,” Hux says, “things…changed, I think. Got better. A little. Maybe.” He sighs. “We put together almost the whole piece in a matter of days. I might be crazy, but it felt like we were more in-sync after we’d talked.”

“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” Caro says encouragingly. “You’ve been on the right track, I think, trying to get in tune with him and all. You can’t dance with someone if you don’t know them.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Hux nods. He sips at the last of his now-cold tea and then pushes the cup away. He bites his lip — now comes the part he’s not sure how to tell, the part he still hardly understands himself. He takes a deep breath. “But then…”

“There’s a _but then?!”_ Caro repeats with indecent glee. “Ooh, _what_ have you been keeping from me?”

“Nothing,” Hux assures her. He pauses. “Well. Not nothing. Or maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

“Did you sleep with him?” Caro guesses at once. She looks like she’s about to burst into applause.

Hux blushes immediately. “Who do you think I am?” he retorts, trying his best to sound injured even as his heartbeat picks up inside his chest. “Unlike _you,_ I don’t charm the pants off all my partners as soon as we leave the dressing rooms,” he reminds her.

 “Sometimes before,” Caro corrects him merrily. “Don’t sell me short, I beg you. But really — did you?”

“No!” Hux sputters.

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know!” Miserably, Hux feels his face growing redder and redder. Every weighted silence, every lingering glance from last night now hangs behind his eyes, taunting him without mercy.

“But you’ve thought about it, haven’t you?” Caro’s enjoying herself.

“That’s _none of your business,”_ Hux protests, knowing he has lost. Caroline’s grin grows only wider.

 “All right, then — do you _want_ to?” she asks innocently.

Hux opens his mouth to speak, and nothing comes out. He fumbles for words for a moment, knowing his cheeks are as red as the cashmere scarf tossed elegantly over one of Caroline’s shoulders. Unfortunately, his helpless silence is as good as any verbal response; Caro’s nodding knowingly now, _tsk_ ing as she sets down her drink.

“So, if you didn’t sleep with him, what’s this _nothing?”_ she asks, kinder now, interrogation mode switched off. Hux narrows his eyes at her and stays silent. “Oh, come on, love, I was only teasing,” she coaxes. “Tell me what happened. Let’s sort this out, shall we?”

Hux sighs. “Fine.”

He tells her about their dinner last night. “We had — a really good time,” he says, sounding surprised even now. “He complimented the food, and he brought a really nice wine, and we talked. A lot.” He clears his throat. “He’s been…going through a bunch of shit lately, so I guess maybe that’s why he’s been acting strange, being rude, and stuff — or maybe that’s just him, I don’t know, and I suppose I have no way to tell,” he says, only realising the truth of this as he voices it. He becomes aware that he’s babbling, but he hasn’t finished yet.

“And then — God,” Hux sighs, pressing a hand to his forehead, embarrassed even before he’s said anything. “This is so stupid. This is — nothing, and I’m reading so much into it,” he says.

“What? What is it?” Caroline presses gently.

“Well, he had to go — he had to catch a train this morning, and it was late — well, not _that_ late, actually, I invited him to stay longer, which —  _anyway,”_ Hux stammers out. _“Anyway,_ we were at the door, saying goodbye and everything; I wished him a good trip, and all that, and he said, _On se voit mardi matin,_ and then — well, he kissed me,” he expels stupidly.

Caro _squeals._ “That’s not _nothing,_ Hux!”

“He didn’t _kiss me,”_ Hux backtracks in a hurry. Caro looks positively offended. “It was just — well, you know, _les bises,_ like everybody does! Like _friends_ do! It was normal. And nothing,” he adds. “Nothing at all. I’m stupid to think anything of it.”

“Well, all right, everybody does the _bises_ , but do _you guys?_ Is this a normal thing for _you?”_ Caro asks, hawk-eyed as always.

Hux swallows. “Well — no. This was the first time.”

 _“Aha,”_ Caro crows. “Now we’re getting somewhere. I wouldn’t say that’s _nothing,_ then, my dear,” she says seriously. “Especially after he told you…whatever it was that he told you and you’re not telling me, which I respect and which is totally fine,” she adds when Hux makes, protesting, to explain. “He’s coming to trust you, obviously. It sounds like — from what you’ve said about him, and judging from his whole Knights thing and all that — he’s a very private kind of guy, and the fact that he’s opening up to you is huge,” she encourages. “Now, I can’t tell if he wants to sleep with you too, obviously — that’s sort of up to the two of you to figure out,” she teases, winking. “But the fact that he’s letting you in like this is good. Really good. And it’s not nothing at all.”

“You think so?” Hux asks, relieved. Caro nods. Hux sighs. “Thank you,” he says. “God. I feel so stupid, so — juvenile with all this; I mean, I’m thirty years old, and I’ve been in relationships before, for God’s sake, I should know how to interact with men, how to read them by now — but Ren…”

He stops, helpless, unsure what else to say. “Ren is different.”

Caro nods again, her eyes kind. She reaches out to pat his hand. “I know.”

*****

“We’ll finish the piece today,” Hux announces on Tuesday morning. “With the new stuff you’ve thought of, I really think we’ll be able to do it.”

“All right,” says Ren, already stretching in the corner. Hux knows he got back from Ottawa very late last night, and his eyes, dark-ringed, are proof. He looks exhausted, and frankly unwell; Hux wonders if something happened yesterday at the trial, but when he’d tried to ask, as they went up the stairs together this morning, Ren had deflected the question and changed the subject at once. Hux had almost suggested that they cancel their session again today — but somehow he knew that, if anything, dancing would make things better for Ren.

They run through the briefest of barres and petit allegros, and then Ren shows Hux the ending he’s come up with.

Hux can see at once that it’s perfect. It’s not showy or flashy or dangerous; it’s a relatively simple but elegant end to their previous pas de deux, with a couple more lifts, some turns, a promenade finishing in a final pose. Hux picks it up quickly, and they dance through it together, over and over and over, and it’s going to work. “It’s going to work,” Hux says in relief. “I really think it is, Ren. Thank you.” He smiles.

Ren inclines his head briefly. “The rest of it needs work,” he comments.

Hux sighs, his smile fading. No matter how good his ending, Ren’s right: the rest of the piece is still in bad shape, considering the Festival is in less than four weeks. “You’re right.” He sighs again. “From the top?”

Hux restarts the music, and they get to dancing as if going off to war.

The partner work where they _aren’t_ touching isn’t too bad, all things considered — better than Hux had remembered, in fact; but when they get to the proper pas de deux, things spiral very quickly out of control. Any tentative harmony they had found — in the real world, at Hux’s, even just during this first section — disappears at once.

They haven’t defined who’s leading and when: they keep putting it off, to be determined _one day, one day, one day._ But as the dance goes on, it becomes immediately clear that _one day_ needs to be _right now,_ because they are fighting, fighting still.

 _“No,_ Ren,” Hux says through clenched teeth, his earlier hopeful mood gone without a trace, after Ren has set him down hard from a lift and now refuses to be led into a promenade. “Follow me, for Christ’s sake. _Follow!”_

“Let me lead,” Ren insists; and he is bigger than Hux, stronger than Hux, and he forces him to follow.

Hux catches sight of them in the mirror, and his anger grows only hotter when he sees how _good_ they look: Ren’s bulk, his dark eyes, his massive hands around Hux’s slim waist, contrasting sharply with Hux’s own fair skin and delicate limbs, his hair glinting copper in the light. “Enough,” Hux hisses.

He lets himself be lifted again, up to Ren’s shoulder for the barest moment; and then leaps nimbly down and draws Ren into a closed position, with himself in the lead. Ren’s eyes glint fiercely and Hux smiles, blithe and bitter, as he leads them into the next tight and intricate sequence.

Ren fights him at every step: they are both breathing hard, now, and as the song launches into the frenzied, ululating bridge section, they strain against each other, eyes and muscles locked.

 “Follow me,” Hux breathes, their faces pressed so close, too close. His heart beats.

 _“No,”_   Ren says, low in his throat.

And then all at once — at last — they are kissing.

Hux’s lips come up to meet Ren’s with a desperate breath. It feels like a consummation.

Things happen very quickly after that.

They struggle: Ren pushing Hux back against the mirrored wall, Hux fighting him but eventually giving in with a cry. Ren’s lips are harsh on his mouth and his neck and his jaw; his body is hot and hard and he works his thigh between Hux’s legs. Hux turns his head to let Ren mouth at his throat, and he catches sight of them in the mirror — sees his own eyes wide and dark and hungry, colour high in his cheeks; and then he can take no more, and he turns them so that he’s pinning Ren against the wall now, breathing his name, biting at his pretty lips. Ren gives a sigh that is so much weaker, so much softer than Hux would ever have imagined could come from someone as big, as fierce as him, and it sends heat shooting through him and elicits a sound from deep in his core. _Ren._

The song ends. Silence descends as if falling from a very great height. Hux’s hands are braced on the mirror, on either side of Ren’s shoulders; one of Ren’s has come up, possessive — and still, somehow, gentle — to rest on the nape of Hux’s neck. Without the music they seem to be lost, as if they had been dancing all along. Their eyes meet for a second, and Hux is startled to see something fragile in Ren’s gaze, like a lost child, an open wound. He feels an emptiness like a blow to the chest. They both look away at once.

Without a word Hux moves away from him. “I should go,” he says: quietly, but making it clear that there is no room for discussion. It’s barely eleven-thirty; they have hours left, and they need the time badly. But they both know they cannot go on dancing after…this.

Ren does not protest. He looks on in silence, arms folded and eyes watchful, as Hux gathers up his things. The little _bzz_ of the aux cord being disconnected is improbably loud in the air, which is warm, too warm, and heavy now. The studio feels close and crushing. Hux needs to get out.

 _“À_ _demain_ _,”_ Hux says at the door. His gaze lingers on Ren for a moment and then he ducks his head and goes.

What he does not see, after he leaves, is Ren sinking to the floor, knees tucked up and head bowed, and staying that way for what seems an age.

*

The next morning, again, Hux makes up his mind to act as if nothing has changed between them. _Nothing has._

He will forget that anything happened. He will forget that he walked home in a daze (forgoing the métro despite the sudden rain and thunder: needing to walk, to move, to stop thinking); that he collapsed into bed as soon as he got home, even though it was hardly the mid-afternoon; that he stripped off his dirty dance clothes and reached, fevered, to touch himself like a foolish child, as the rain poured down and lightning flashed outside. He will forget that he has wanted this for a long, long time — for no matter how badly he wants it, he knows he _should not_ want it, and cannot have it, besides.

By some mercy the weather is cold. He winds a scarf around the bruises on his neck.

Ren is waiting outside the door to the studio. Hux is surprised to see him — it’s before ten-thirty, after all, and he has never known Ren to get here first. He’s leaning against the wall and smoking, and when Hux approaches, he stubs out his cigarette and unlocks the door in silence. Hux follows him up the stairs and says nothing.

“No Starbucks this morning,” Ren comments, breaking the silence as they take off their shoes and go upstairs. The studio is freezing: yesterday’s stormy warmth has been replaced with a damp chill that seeps through the walls.

Hux is startled when he speaks, having been deep inside his own head, his thoughts running in circles and circles again. He’s taking off his coat and scarf slowly, slowly, prolonging the inevitable. He glances at Ren and gives an awkward, forced smile; “No,” he manages. “Not today.” His neck is bare.

Ren’s eyes flick down to the markings on Hux’s throat: dark, wine-dark against the pale skin. “I see.”

He meets Hux’s eyes for a second; Hux looks away. He starts the barre playlist and they say no more.

After the barre they stretch separately for a while, dragging out the time, but after nearly an hour they cannot avoid it any longer. With dismay Hux says, “Shall we?”, and before Ren can answer, he goes to start the song and then finds his place on the floor. Ren, silent, takes his too.

They are frozen for the first few beats of the song, hearing the familiar introduction. Then the percussion kicks in, and they dance.

It’s better. At once Hux can tell — it’s better, so much better. It’s not perfect, not yet, but there is a new harmony, almost palpable, between them. The sections that had given them trouble before are now easier, smoother, more natural; they meet for the pas de deux and begin to dance it as if it had never been a fight. Hux leads Ren into a promenade, and after he comes down from the first lift, he lets Ren take control and guide him through the next steps. They go on like this, alternating dominance, finally _listening_ to one another and working something out.

 _This is it,_ Hux knows. _This is the understanding I’ve been looking for._

He relaxes into Ren’s arms and they dance.

The ending is perfect, again. They strike their final pose — an attitude of grief, of mourning, and yet of hope. The song ends, and they stay that way for a moment as the last notes die away. In the mirror they look stunning. They look right.

It’s Ren who breaks the pose at last.

“It’s done,” he says. _C’est fini._

“Yes,” Hux agrees. “And we survived.”

Their eyes meet in the mirror. Hux is overcome at once with the need to go to him, to take him in his arms, to kiss him and succumb to him —  _go on, go on, it would be so easy —_ and he can see, incredibly, in his eyes, that Ren feels this pull too. But Hux looks away.

“Let’s do it again,” he says. “From the top.”

_I am here to dance. We are here to dance._

So they dance.

All day they dance, and the sky breaks open, and rain and hail pour down outside. They turn up the music and they dance through the storm, their bodies singing and alive. They dance through the piece over and over and over again, until it is perfect, until it transcends. They have become everything Hux has hoped for them, everything he has dreamed, even more. He hardly dares to believe it. _Any of it._

Again, hours later, Ren says, “It’s done.” His voice is softer now: not weary, but content.

Their eyes meet in the mirror again, and Hux sees Ren smile. There is something of a bowstring held taut in that smile; and now finally Hux quiets his objections and lets himself have what he wants. He goes to him and looks him in the eye, lays his hands on his arms and then reaches up to kiss him; and the arrow in Ren’s smile flies free.

Ren makes love the way he dances.

His body, his movements are reverent and deserving of reverence; every part of him is passionate, alive. The wood floor is hard underneath them but they do not care. Hux kisses Ren’s mouth and feels him yield, and then just as in the dance they each take the lead, back and forth, receiving and giving in equal measure. Ren says Hux’s name softly, softly, and his fingers are so tender on his skin.

They breathe together, reach an end together, and sink into each other at last.

They lay there, on the dance floor like an altar, and the sun breaks through the clouds and bathes them in its warmth. Hux presses a kiss to the damp skin at Ren’s temple. He has never known such peace.

“It’s perfect,” Ren murmurs.

Hux nods, eyes closed. “Yes. Finally.”

Ren shifts. He makes to stand. Dazed and half-dreaming, Hux follows. Ren pulls him into his arms. In the mirrors they are two; their shadows on the floor make one.

“Perfect,” Ren says.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The amazing [xan-drei](http://xan-drei.tumblr.com) did some [beautiful art](http://xan-drei.tumblr.com/post/154666964131/commission-for-the-lovely-huxes-based-on-their) for this chapter!!!!! Go scream about it forever, like I'm doing. Thank you, Xan!! *blows kisses*
> 
> As usual, [here's](http://huxes.tumblr.com/post/153345651011/alors-on-danse-chapter-5-kitseybarbours-star) the link on my Star Wars blog, and [here's](http://abernathae.tumblr.com) my main blog too. Thank you _so_ much to all of you who've been reading, leaving kudos, reblogging, and commenting so far; you're awesome. ❤️


	6. Chapter 6

*

“I want to see _Starkiller,”_ Ren says, as they are towelling off at the end of the day, a couple weeks later. The festival is in a week and a half.

Hux pauses, startled. “But — haven’t you already?” he asks. When Ren had sought him out, he’d named _Starkiller_ as a piece he’d been impressed with; Hux had assumed, naturally, that he’d seen it live at some point, whether when Hux was dancing it or later on.

Ren nods. “Of course,” he says. “I was in London during its original run. I went twice.”

Hux flushes, pleasantly surprised. “I see,” he says. He ducks his chin, flattered. “Well — if you’ve seen me dance it before, why do you want to see it again?”

“Because now you’re here,” Ren says, as if this is perfectly obvious. A little divot appears between his brows. “You’re — here,” he repeats. “With me.”

“Oh,” Hux says. “Yes.” Somehow he understands. He smiles. “All right.”

He goes to the stereo and picks up his iPod, scrolls all the way down to a playlist he hasn’t touched in years: titled simply _mine,_ it’s composed of all the songs he choreographed to while he was dancing in France, during the time he decided to pursue choreography rather than just dance as a career. He flicks past the classical pieces, all the way down to the mp3 file with no cover art, the one hand-mixed on his laptop during several sleepless nights in Paris when inspiration kept him awake. _Starkiller._

He presses play, and hurries to the centre of the floor. He stands frozen in the opening attitude, in silence for a moment, and then —

_“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”_

It’s Hux’s own voice on the track: soft, husky, edged with something determined and fierce. He’d recorded it in the middle of the night, on a studio-quality microphone begged from the techs at the Palais Garnier and hooked up to his shitty laptop; he’d already chosen a song and choreographed most of the piece, but something was still _missing._ The quote had hit him in the middle of a show and he’d nearly fallen out of a pirouette, burning to get home and put the final touch on his vision.

_“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”_

The opening notes of the song, quick and building and pulsing, fade in as Hux’s younger self repeats, layered over and over, Oppenheimer’s immortal words. When the track’s vocals begin, his words fade out, and Hux begins to dance.

It’s been years, but this piece still feels like home. Hux smiles as he begins the familiar steps, starting out slow and then building in pace with the song. For the first verse he moves with languor, bending deeply into a plié in fifth, folding his body over and then reaching, reaching to the ceiling above.

 _Change everything you are,_ moans the vocalist as more instruments join the initial piano, weaving a tight and urgent tapestry of sound, _and everything you were; your number had been called…_

He can feel Ren’s eyes tracking his every move, and he dances all the better for it.

The music picks up, and Hux whips through a series of turns and brisé jumps. As the song launches into the first chorus, he throws himself into a magnificent fouetté jeté; when he lands, he sees Ren smiling in the mirror.

_Best, you’ve got to be the best, you’ve got to change the world…_

The song builds, builds, builds, and Hux feels strength flowing through him. He is buoyed by memories of dancing this piece in front of sold-out houses, his younger self knowing that he had made it, that this piece would cement him among the world’s best living choreographers.

And this, now, dancing it for Ren — this is better than that.

The bridge is instrumental, the climax of the piece. Hux prepares for a triple pirouette, executes it, and then takes a deep plié and flies through a double tour en l’air. A jeté tournant is next, and, as the music reaches a crescendo, another grand jeté, even higher than the first. He seems to freeze for a moment, held high in the air as the track fades to silence for a brief moment.

Ren has not taken his eyes from him for a second.

He lands. The final verse begins, soft, lulling, and Hux’s movements soften too. He moves through a last set of chaîné turns, slow and lazy, and then, as the vocals finish, strikes a final arabesque, his arms held in sharp defiance.

_“Destroyer of worlds.”_

His younger voice speaks, seductive, and then there is silence.

Hux stays poised for a moment. And then Ren begins to clap.

Hux breaks his ending pose. He stands, hesitant, motionless. Ren says softly, “My God.”

“Was it — all right?” Hux asks, breathless. "It's been a while." He goes quickly to the front of the room to fetch water, a towel. He feels Ren’s eyes on him still as he takes a drink and wipes the sweat from his face and neck. His chest is rising and falling hard; his muscles sing.

“Incredible,” Ren says, from close behind him. His voice nearly thrums with intensity. Hux turns around, and he is right there, his eyes alight. Ren lays his hands on Hux’s arms. “It was incredible. Genius.” He looks Hux directly in the eyes. “You astonish me.”

“You don’t mean that,” Hux says immediately, a knee-jerk reaction. “God, Ren, have you — have you _seen_ yourself, do you know who you are —? I’m _nothing,_ compared to you. I’m nobody.”

Ren shakes his head. “You are not nobody. You could never be nobody,” he says, in English, and that is how Hux knows he means it. His grip on Hux’s forearms tightens, his face entirely serious. “We are the same. We are — equals. I promise you.”

“Ren,” Hux says. “God. Ren.” And he closes his eyes.

Ren kisses him. Hux lets himself be carried away.

*

The next few days of rehearsals fly by. The festival approaches fast; Hux knows they will be ready.

And then things change.

On the Tuesday before, Ren arrives at the studio with a shifting, guilty look in his eyes. “What’s the matter?” Hux asks him on the stairs, feeling dread bloom in the pit of his stomach. Ren is silent. “Ren,” Hux presses, his heart in his throat. “Did something happen? Is it the trial?”

“Yes and no,” Ren says, reluctant, as they cross the threshold of the studio together. “I have something to tell you.”

“Then tell me,” Hux demands, feeling ill.

“Three things,” Ren says. He sits down to put his slippers on; Hux stays standing, almost paralysed with fear. He has no idea what to expect. “One,” Ren says, and he sounds weary already. “The last day of the trial has been moved up. It’s the same day as the show.”

Hux’s eyes widen. _“What?”_

They had _planned_ for this, to avoid this very thing. Originally, they’d been scheduled to dance for several nights of the FTA, but with the trial still dragging on due to Snoque’s precarious health, Ren had arranged for their performance to be a one-night-only engagement on the last day of the festival. (He’d pointed out, too, that this would draw more of a crowd: _Brendon Huxley and Kylo Ren, together in Montréal for the very first time, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity;_ and Hux could hardly argue with that.) The last night is a Sunday, the day Ren had thought least likely for a court session to be scheduled; but apparently he was wrong.

“You’re joking,” Hux says miserably.

Ren shakes his head. “I’m sorry.” He sighs, his composure wavering. “And that’s not the worst of it.”

“God, _tell me,”_ Hux begs him. “Don’t drag it out like this.”

“It’s been moved because Snoque wants to attend,” Ren says bluntly.

_“What?!”_

“He’s coming to see us dance,” Ren repeats. “He requested specifically.” With every word his breathing gets shallower. “He’s being moved back to Montréal soon for a new treatment program anyway, so he insisted that he come earlier, to see us perform. See _me_ perform.” Ren looks tortured, anxious, his eyes flicking back and forth. Hux feels a pang in his chest.

He goes to his side, kneels next to him and takes his hand. “And you’re letting him?” Hux asks. “You didn’t tell him no?”

“No,” Ren answers. He chooses his words with care, even as his free hand unclenches and clenches up at his side, like a frightened bird fluttering against the bars of its cage. “I think — I need to do this. I need to show him. That I can do this on my own.”

“And you can,” Hux promises at once. “You _have._ Look at you, Ren — look at your career. You’ve done amazing things without him.”

 _“Ren_ has done amazing things without him,” Ren says, quiet.

Hux frowns. “Yes. That’s what I said. What do you —?”

“Ren…Ren is not _me._ Snoque didn’t know Ren.”

Ren’s eyes are serious, but Hux doesn’t understand a word he’s saying. “Ren, please, what —”

“Kylo Ren was someone I created,” Ren announces tonelessly. “When I was young, dancing under Snoque. When things got bad — once I realised how bad they were — I needed some way to escape. I imagined a way out.” He ducks his head, hunches over. He tucks his long legs under him, one shoe on, one foot bare. He looks so young. “I…invented Kylo Ren. He was another version of me — someone stronger, who didn’t have to listen to Snoque, didn’t have to obey him. Ren was better than him. Snoque couldn’t hurt him.”

He takes a shallow breath, looking agonised. Hux’s heart is breaking. Ren has not finished.

 “Whatever Snoque said to _Ben,_ all the awful things, the cruelties — they were not for Ren,” Ren explains, talking faster now, as if trying to spit out the words before they poison him. “The worse things got with Snoque, the more I leaned on Kylo Ren. I felt stronger, when I pretended I was him. I danced better — I knew it, and Snoque did, too, although he didn’t know why. So it only made sense that once I left Snoque, I…became him,” Ren says. “I left Ben behind. I thought him weak and powerless, of no use to me anymore. I thought Ben was the problem all along.”

“He wasn’t,” Hux assures him softly. “Don’t blame yourself. Don’t ever, ever blame yourself. It was Snoque. You must know that.”

Ren nods. “I know,” he says, and there is steel now in his eyes. His jaw is set. “It was not Ben. It was _him;_ it was Snoque all along. I did nothing wrong. Ben did nothing wrong.”

“No,” Hux affirms. “Never. You were so young.”

Ren nods again. “I know that now. I’ve come to terms. And that’s why,” he says, looking up at Hux, “I’m ready to be Ben again.”

Hux’s eyes grow wide. “You’re _what?”_ he asks, disbelieving.

“I’m going to perform as Ben,” Ren announces. “I’ve already let the festival know. Brendon Huxley and Ben Organa-Solo. One night and one night only.”

“This is _insane,”_ Hux gasps. “The festival — the trial — and Snoque, my God, what will Snoque do?”

“I don’t care,” Ren says. His back straightens. “The trial is almost over. We are winning. When it is done, he will have no hold on me anymore; I will never have cause to see him again. I will be free of him forever.”

Hux’s heart skips a beat: _We are winning._ Even now that they are…whatever they are, Ren hasn’t been informing Hux about the progress of the trial. He’s still having to go into Ottawa frequently, sometimes two or three times a week, and when he returns, he’s always exhausted, gaunt and pale and surly. Hux had taken this to mean that things were not going well, but he sensed that Ren would not take kindly to him asking; _if he needs anything badly, he’ll tell me._

But he hadn’t needed anything, hadn’t reached out for help, _because things were going well._ “You’re winning,” Hux repeats, stunned. “Really? Your case is solid? There’s — evidence?” he asks, wincing, not wanting to imagine what that evidence might be.

Ren nods. “My family has spoken out against him,” he says, and his voice is dead, almost free of emotion; but Hux can tell he’s struggling. “My mother, my uncle…they saw things, saw — bruises, cuts, little things I couldn’t explain away. And they saw that I’d…changed. Gotten quiet, sad. Scared.” There is a note of bitterness in his voice. “But they never said anything at the time. My mother was touring all the time, and my uncle had Renée to think about, and his school besides. And I never said anything either, so it was easier just to…ignore it.”

“Ren,” Hux says. “Oh, Ren. I’m so sorry.” He has no other words.

“But they’re speaking now,” Ren says. He raises his head, defiant. “And people are listening. The court believes us. Believes — _me._ It’s working. It’s working.”

There is a timid, fragile hope in his voice. All at once, Hux sees him: young, afraid, a small boy in ballet clothes, cowering in fear as insults were hurled at him, blows thrown. He has never even met Snoque. All the same, he has never hated anyone more. “He deserves the worst,” he says softly. “For what he did to you.”

“Thank you,” Ren says. “I hope he will get it.” He looks away, and that is that.

Hux sighs hugely. He stretches out his legs, points his toes and slides his slippers on. “Is that all?” he asks gently, trying to lighten the mood. “No more…earth-shattering revelations before we start to dance?” He tries a smile.

Ren returns it, barely. He stands, and holds out a hand to pull Hux to his feet. He kisses him, just once, soft and almost sad. “No more,” he promises. “Let’s dance.”

Hux nods. They dance.

*

Every day, the festival and the trial loom closer. They are ready for one, Hux has no doubt, but the other…The timing could not be worse. He has visions of Ren coming back shattered, the trial lost and Snoque unpunished, and then having to dance that night, to throw himself into the intense emotions and physicality of their piece. _And onstage, in front of hundreds. In front of him._ It seems almost impossible. Hux’s dread grows heavier with each passing day. _There must be something I can do._

He calls Ren on Thursday night.

“Hello?” Ren answers on the second ring.

“Hi,” Hux says. “How are things? Are you packed?”

“Haven’t even started.” Ren sounds tired; Hux wonders briefly if this was a bad idea, and then firmly pushes that thought away. _“_ _Qu’est-ce_ _qu’il_ _y a?”_ Ren asks, when he’s silent for a moment. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Hux replies. “I just — I wanted to ask.”

“Yes?”

“Do you want me there with you?” Hux expels. “For the last day of the trial?”

There is a long pause. Hux shuts his eyes, worrying at the drawstring of his hoodie. _Shit._

“Yes,” Ren answers finally. Hux opens his eyes.

“Really?”

“Mm.” Hux can almost hear him nod. “I would like that. It would be good to have you there. It would…help.”

“You’re sure?” Hux presses, needing to be certain.

“Yes. I promise.”

“Okay,” Hux says, a smile breaking across his face. “Great. I’ll book a train ticket right now.” He grabs his laptop and opens the VIA Rail webpage, balancing his phone on his shoulder. He types _montreal ottawa_ into the search bar and waits for the page to load: the hi-speed in his apartment is more an ideal than a reality.

“Oh, wait — will I, um — will I need a hotel room, too?” he asks awkwardly, suddenly realising. “Will your family…ask questions?” He feels himself blushing furiously.

He can hear Ren’s smile through the phone. He gives a low laugh. “They won’t. Don’t book a room.”

“Okay,” Hux manages, still pink-cheeked as a child. “Thanks.”

“Thank _you,”_ Ren says with unexpected candour. “For wanting to be there. It means a lot. _Tu n'as pas idée à quel point.”_

“Of course,” Hux says. “Of course I want to be there. I want to help you through this. I want to see you heal.”

Ren exhales a long breath. When he speaks again, his voice is thick. “Thank you.”

“One more thing,” Hux adds softly. “Are you Ben, now? With everyone? With — me?”

“No,” Ren answers after a moment. “I don’t — no. I don’t want to be,” he says, somewhat obscurely, and then clarifies: “I only want to show Snoque. I’ve been Ren for so long…” He pauses. “Ben is who the public knows,” he explains. “Ren is…me, in private. _Only_ me. I’m the only one who knows him, really — and you,” he adds. “You, now. I’m Ren with you. I want to stay that way.”

The revelation is delivered with an almost childish tenderness, a self-aware desire to be accepted: _to be loved._

“Goodnight, Ren,” Hux tells him, gentle.

He can hear the soft smile on the other end of the line. “Goodnight.”

They hang up. Hux buys his train ticket, and he packs his bag. They are going into hell, he knows it, but they will be together. They will make it through.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Hux dances to is [Butterflies and Hurricanes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzCKrwOme2U) by Muse, which, as far as I'm concerned, is in fact _about Hux;_ and yes, that was an Ex Machina reference — Caleb Smith is my dream man.
> 
>  
> 
> As per the usual, [here's](http://huxes.tumblr.com/post/153964271161/alors-on-danse-chapter-6-kitseybarbours-star) this week's chapter on my Star Wars blog, and [here's](http://abernathae.tumblr.com/) my main blog too.
> 
>  
> 
> Finally — we're almost done, kids! Thank you so, _so_ much to everyone who's stuck with me (us?) this whole way. Your support means the world to me.


	7. Chapter 7

*

“I should tell you about my parents.”

It’s Saturday: tomorrow is the long-awaited, longer-dreaded day. By the mid-afternoon, they’re settled into their compartment on the Montréal-Ottawa train, after an endless and gruelling tech rehearsal this morning. Ren has brought his laptop, Hux his book and iPod, but he sets them aside when Ren leans forward, his eyes serious.

“Tell me what?” Hux asks him.

“Just _tell_ you,” Ren repeats. “They can be…a little much, at first. I don’t want you to be completely unprepared.”

Hux gives a short laugh: he’s given similar speeches, over the years, to his previous partners, before bringing them home to meet his strict, distant, naval-commandant father —  _although never, of course, before bringing them to a trial._  “All right,” he says. “Give me a crash course.”

“My father left when I was little. You already know that,” Ren says. “He’s — he can be difficult to get used to, although probably not as difficult as me.” He gives a self-conscious little shrug. “My mother…resents him,” he says frankly, “for leaving, and for not being around for…everything with Snoque.  I suppose I resent him too, a little,” he adds, ponderous. “In all honesty, I can’t say that I know him too well. Or that he knows me — my uncle Luc was more of a father to me than he ever was. You know, this might be the only time he’ll ever have seen me dance...” He pauses. “All the same, I miss him.”

He is silent for a moment. “Is that all?” Hux prompts him gently.

“My mother,” Ren says, “is quite something.” A smile tugs at his mouth. “You’ll like her. You remind me of her, sometimes. There’s something distinctly… _imperial_ about the both of you,” he explains. “Like you were royalty in your past lives.” There is a childish mischief in his eyes.

Hux has to laugh. “Really? My God,” he teases. “You shouldn’t have told me; it’s going to go to my head, now. But your mother…” He shakes his head. “She’s an incredible dancer. I’ve admired her — well, _idolised_ , I suppose, is the better word — since I was a kid. I still can’t quite believe I’m going to _meet_ her. Today.” He laughs again.

“She’ll like you,” Ren promises. “She might not show it, not in the usual way, but she will.”

“And what about Luc and Renée?” Hux asks.

Ren raises his eyebrows. “Luc will be no problem, but Renée can be a handful —  _she’ll_ be the one threatening to end your life if ever you break my heart, I can tell you that for sure…”

Hux feels a glow in the pit of his stomach as Ren continues speaking. _If ever you break my heart:_ suggesting, then, that Ren’s heart is in a position to be broken by him, by Hux of all people…This casual admission, nearly a slip of the tongue, makes his own heart skip a beat. Even now, _here,_ he can hardly believe that Ren has chosen him.

Once Hux has been sufficiently briefed on the Organa-Solo family and its complicated dynamics, they fall into a comfortable silence and into their own routines. Ren pulls out his computer, starts working busily away at something; Hux reads a few pages and then feels his eyes growing heavy. He nods off for the rest of the trip, lulled by the rocking and rumbling of the train and the quiet steadiness of Ren’s presence at his side.

Ren wakes him as they arrive in Ottawa, around five o’clock. The festival is in twenty-four hours, the trial even less.

Léa Organa is there to meet them in the hotel lobby — Ren texted her during the cab ride from the train station. She rises from an armchair as they come in through the revolving doors.

She’s a small woman; Hux has always known this, objectively, having seen her interviewed, seen videos of her dancing in her heyday, in the years before he’d ever taken a ballet class. But he’s only really struck by it when he sees this fierce-looking, graceful woman stride across the lobby as if it’s a ballroom and reach up on her toes to kiss her son on both cheeks: her son, who is easily a full foot taller than her, and the same age now as she was when she quit Les Grands Ballets Canadiens at the peak of her career and struck out on her own. Ren drops his bag and briefly embraces his mother, murmuring _“Bonjour, Maman”_ in her ear.

“How was the train ride?” Léa asks briskly, her Québec drawl even stronger than Ren’s, un-refined by years in France the way his has been. Her hair, once nearly as dark as Ren’s, is a lighter chestnut now, streaked with grey and arranged with neat perfection. She flicks her eyes to Hux but doesn’t deign to acknowledge his presence, except by a slight inclination of the head: _Ah. You._

“Good, Maman,” Ren says. He gestures to Hux: “This is Brendon Huxley, my dance partner. He pauses, hesitates, and then adds, “Well, actually, he’s my…boyfriend, too.” He shoots Hux a self-conscious look: _Is that okay?_

Hux smiles in return: _Yeah. That’s okay._

 “Is everyone here already? I’ll go check in,” Ren hurries on, as Léa has offered no response to his declaration but a _hmm_ and an eyebrow-raise. He lays a hand on Hux’s shoulder for the barest moment, shooting him a look that seems to say, _Sorry, but I have no choice;_ and then he heads off to the front desk, leaving Hux alone with one of North America’s finest ballet dancers, a woman he’s admired since childhood — the woman who is now, bizarrely and terrifyingly, his new boyfriend’s mother.

 _“Vous êtes M. Huxley, alors?”_ Apparently she’d been waiting for Ren to leave, for now Léa wastes no time in beginning her appraisal of him, her eyes flicking impassively up and down his frame. Her eyebrows cock in the same way Ren’s do — a look of _Well, what are you waiting for?_

 _“Oui, Mme Organa,”_ Hux hurries to reply, his accent slipping with his nerves. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

 _“Enchantée,”_ Ren’s mother says. “How is my son?”

“Er — he’s well,” Hux blurts. Clearly Mme Organa is not one to bandy words. “Ah — as well as you’d expect, I suppose,” he tacks on idiotically, feeling his face colour. “Stressed,” he explains. “We both are. About the — festival. And this. And this, of course,” he hastens to add. _Pull yourself together, man!_  “I’m glad I could be here to support him,” he finishes lamely. _Well done. A really brilliant first impression you’ve made._

He’s saved from embarrassing himself any further by the reappearance of Ren, two key-cards in hand. Hux turns to him with relief and accepts one of the cards — he stuffs it quickly into his pocket, feeling like a guilty teenager under Léa’s sharp-eyed gaze. “Thanks,” he manages, forcing a smile. Ren looks concerned: _That bad?_ his eyes ask.

Hux gives a tight nod. _That bad._

 _“Tu peux monter,”_ Léa says, turning brusquely to her son. “Your uncle and cousin are down the hall from the two of you; Hans has gone out to get coffee.” Ren nods and picks up the luggage, both his and Hux’s; Hux hesitates, unsure whether to follow him. Léa answers for him: “We’re going to have a drink,” she tells Ren, meaning her and Hux. “Go get settled.” She presses his arm and motions him toward the elevators.

Ren lingers a moment, shooting an uncertain look at Hux (whose own eyes widen in slight panic), but at another shoo from Léa, he goes. “Four-fourteen,” he tells Hux, waving the key card. There’s a hint of dark humour about his mouth, the barest trace of an _oh-shit_ grin: _Good luck._

“Got it,” Hux says. He waves weakly, and then Léa Organa takes hold of his elbow with surprising force for such a tiny woman, and leads him firmly to the lobby bar.

“House red,” she tells the bartender, “as long as it’s not a merlot. For you?” she asks Hux.

“Same,” he manages, thinking it’s best to play it safe and go along with her. “Thanks.”

They get their drinks, and Léa directs Hux to a little table by the window. She settles in to the plush armchair as if it were a throne (Hux sees what Ren means, the air of empire about her), and takes one discriminatory sip of her wine. She wrinkles her nose. “Passable,” she pronounces. She takes another sip — Hux mirrors her meekly, and finds the wine to be rather excellent — and then she clears her throat, folding her veined, beringed hands in her lap.

“I have seen you dance,” Léa announces.

Her switch to heavily-accented English is obviously for Hux’s benefit, and it makes him blush: he hadn’t thought he was doing too badly, in French. He blinks. “Oh,” he says intelligently. “Ah — dance what? Where?”

Despite the very real intimidation she strikes into his heart, his stomach flips in excitement, his pulse picking up: _Léa Organa has seen me dance! Léa Organa herself!_

“Balanchine,” Léa answers. _“Apollo._ At the Paris Opéra.”

“Oh!” Hux is pleasantly surprised. That season in Paris was the only time he’s ever danced that variation, but of his repertoire it’s one of his favourites. He dances it still, sometimes, as a warm-up or just for fun, and absently, he wonders if he could work it in to l’Ordre’s rep for next season, maybe sometime in the spring… “And what did you think?” he blurts out, seeing that Léa has raised her eyebrows in that _way_ of theirs again, hers and her son’s.

“Good,” Léa says with a slight, elegant shrug. She nods, takes another sip of her wine, and Hux senses that this is high praise, from her. She nods again. “Yes. Good.”

Hux flushes deeper. _“Merci, madame.”_

“But we are not here to talk about you,” she tells him bluntly. Hux deflates a little, although of course he’d suspected that the great Léa Organa had not sat her only son’s new partner-slash-boyfriend down to heap praise on his dance career — especially not now, on the eve of the trial. And so he is not surprised when Léa’s next question is, “How much has Ben told you about this court case?”

“A fair bit,” Hux admits, not seeing the sense in hiding anything from her. “I think I have the whole story. Well, mostly,” he revises, all at once unsure: Léa has given a slight frown. “I think.”

“Did he tell you how it all started?”

“How — what started?” Hux asks hesitantly. “Sorry.”

“Everything with Snoque,” Léa says, with a little impatient wave of the hand that Ren has also inherited. Hux almost smiles: it’s endearing, seeing these echoes of the son in the mother.

“No,” Hux says. “No, I don’t think so.” He frowns, too.

To his surprise, Léa heaves a sigh, shaking her head. “He should have told you,” she says baldly. “He won’t have, though — he will have wanted to let you form your own impressions of me,” she explains, nodding to herself as if confirming suspicions. “We have had our challenges, but I know he will still have kept that from you. He wouldn’t want to sully your ideas of me.” She raises her chin as if that explains everything, but Hux is still at a loss.

“I’m sorry?” he stammers. “I don’t think I understand.” He registers, queerly, how right Léa is, in that he _had_ had ideas of her; _I suppose she’s used to that, she would be…_

“It was my fault,” Léa announces. “Everything that happened with Snoque — it can all be traced back to me. I brought him into Ben’s life.”

“How?” Hux is surprised.

“A VHS tape,” Léa says bitterly. “One of my friends owned a studio, _before,_ and I taught there part-time, as often as I could. We started Ben’s lessons there; I taught one of his classes. I had given him a solo — his first ever. He was only six years old, and already I knew, already I could see that he would be magnificent.”

There is brittle pride in her voice. “He practised that little piece as if his life depended on it. It was only for the class recital; he had those three minutes or so to himself, just before the entr’acte, but you’d have thought he was dancing Don Quixote, the way he took it to heart.” She shakes her head. “So little. So determined — with his _ears,_ and his little slippers…”

She blinks, bringing herself out of her reminiscence. “So. He had his solo, and we filmed the recital, of course. He was…fantastic. Even at that age, there was something about him, an _essence,_ you know — you dance with him,” she says. “You know.”

Hux nods. Léa is not bragging, not exaggerating because he is her son; she is stating a fact that Hux knows well to be true, knows it the way she knows — as a dancer.

“The recital was just before I left on tour with la Résistance,” she says. “We went to France first. I knew Snoque, vaguely, or certainly knew _of_ him. This was before he’d gone out on his own; at the time he was teaching for l’Opéra, after he’d had to stop dancing for them — his car accident was…when, nineteen-ninety, I think, and this was ninety-six. We were the Opéra’s guest company that season. Snoque and I became acquainted during our time there.” Léa gives a frown. “He was…odd, certainly. Reclusive and prickly; stern to the point of coldness. He never smiled, never seemed particularly interested in the other dancers or their lives.” She shakes her head. “But naturally, my son came up in conversation, the fact that he danced — and he was fascinated.” Léa takes a sip of her wine. Hux is surprised to see her hand tremble as she sets the glass back down.

“I had brought the recital tape with me,” she tells him, flat. “I showed it to my whole company, and the Opéra’s too; I was so proud of him, and they were all amazed, all my dancers and theirs — and they _meant it._ And then Snoque asked to see it, too.” She gives a short, hard laugh. “If I had told him no. If only I’d told him no, or left the damned tape at home…”

“He knew,” Hux says softly. “He saw what you saw in Ben. He knew what he would be able to…become.”

Léa nods. “Exactly.” She sighs. “He practically begged me to be allowed to teach him. I didn’t think he was serious, at first. I seem to remember I laughed him off: _but M. Snoque, you live in France, you teach here, and he is far too young to leave home, it’s impossible;_ and he looked me dead in the eyes and he said, _I will move. I will do anything. I must teach your boy._ ”

“Did that not seem…strange, to you?” Hux asks tentatively.

Léa shoots him a dark look. “Of course it did,” she bites out. “But what you do not understand, M’sieur Huxley” (dropping the _H_ just like her son), “is that, even if I did not particularly _like_ him, or trust him, to refuse Snoque would have been to turn down the chance of a lifetime, and to jinx my son’s career from the start. Snoque had connections with every great company in the world — and not to mention, even after his accident, he himself was a _master,_ an absolute paragon of classical ballet.” She tosses her head, a hard pride in her eyes. “I did what was best for Ben and his future,” she says, firm and unyielding — but only for a moment. Something seems to sink within her. “Or at least I thought I did,” she says softly.

Despite his misgivings about Léa’s choice for her son (and the fatal mistake it would turn out to be), Hux understands her motivations: why, he of all people knows something about nearly missing the chance of a lifetime...

“You couldn’t have known,” he reminds her. “No one could have predicted…this.”

“No,” Léa agrees. “No one could have. But that does not change that it happened, and that I could have stopped it.”

Hux cannot argue with that.

Léa drains the last of her wine with a steadier hand, and flags the waiter for the cheque. Her signature is a practised, old-Hollywood scrawl. She rises, signalling, apparently, that their little tête-à-tête has come to an end; Hux hurries to down the rest of his glass, regretting that he hadn’t better savoured it.

“Thank you,” Léa Organa says abruptly, as they cross the lobby to the lifts. She takes short, clipped, elegant strides, two for every one of Hux’s. “For being here with my son. And for dancing with him.”

“I’m the one who should be thanking him,” Hux responds at once. The elevator doors open with a soft _ding_ and he motions that Léa go in before him; she presses the button for the third floor with one expertly manicured nail, and the doors slide shut behind them. Hux presses four. “He’s incredible, Madame. You know that already, but it bears repeating.” He shakes his head. “Every day he amazes me,” he says, feeling the truth of it in his very bones. “I am so honoured to dance with him. I am so honoured…to know him,” he adds. “To be in his life like this.”

The elevator arrives at Léa’s floor. She steps into the hallway, and then she pauses and looks back at Hux. “He needs someone like you in his life,” she tells him. “He’s needed someone for a long time. And I am glad,” she adds, “that he has found _you.”_ The stress is unmistakeable.

“Thank you,” Hux says softly. His face glows warm.

Léa smiles slightly, and it feels like a blessing. She waves a hand in farewell as the doors slide shut again, taking Hux up one more floor, to the room where Ren waits — waits for him, as he has waited for so long.

 _And I will be here,_ Hux thinks, _for as long as he needs me to._

*

 They spend that night, the night before the show — before the trial, the reckoning — together.

Late, when they are lying sated and entwined in the big hotel bed, hovering on the edge of sleep, Hux says softly, “Ren, I have to ask.”

Ren shifts, his arms moving around Hux’s waist. _“Dis-moi._ ”

“Why did you decide not to fire me after all?”

Ren makes a noise of surprise — Hux can feel it in his back, pressed against Ren’s bare chest. “You mean in the first few days?”

Hux nods. “Yeah. When it was really rough, at the start — you threatened to, once, but then you changed your mind. Why?”

Ren shrugs, his arms still around Hux. “I suppose I didn’t really mean it, when I said that.”

“No, I think you did,” Hux disagrees. He smirks. “You couldn’t stand me to begin with.”

Ren gives a low rumbling laugh of assent. “Fair enough.” He kisses Hux’s neck. “But I could see that you were just as brilliant as I’d hoped. I wasn’t about to forsake your expertise just because we didn’t get along.” He corrects himself: “Just because I couldn’t bring myself to get along with you.”

“And why was that?” Hux questions.

“I suppose I was jealous,” Ren says mildly.

Hux twists in his arms to frown up at him. “Jealous of _me?”_ Ren nods. Hux gives a disbelieving scoff. _“You,_ whose dance career quite literally made history, were jealous of _me?”_

Ren nods again. “Well, yes,” he says. “You were so —  _normal._ Very talented,” he hurries to add — “ _very_ talented; but so normal. Your career was normal. And it was _yours,”_ he says. “You made it on your own. Without — well.” He falls silent.

Hux understands. “Was that all?” he asks softly.

Ren shrugs. “I thought you were handsome, too,” he says, offhand. “I knew that was going to be a problem.”

Hux laughs aloud. “Are you saying this is a problem?” he teases, gesturing to the two of them in their present state. “I could still _leave_ , you know — the piece could work as a solo —”

Ren hugs him tighter. “No, it couldn’t.” He kisses him.

“No,” Hux agrees when they break apart. “It really couldn’t.”

*

The morning dawns bright and hot. They dress and get ready in silence; Hux helps Ren tie his tie, straightens the lapels of his sombre grey suit. He reaches up to press a kiss to his mouth in front of the full-length mirror. _“Courage,”_ Hux whispers. _“Tout va bien se passer.”_

 _“_ _J’espère_ _que_ _t’as_ _raison.”_ Ren kisses him again, and sighs. His phone chimes from his pocket; he pulls it out. As he reads the text, a grim look settles over his face. “Come on. They’re downstairs.”

Hux, Ren, Léa, Hans, Luc, and Renée all pile into the waiting taxicab, everyone dressed in their best, silent and stone-faced. There’s traffic on the way to the courthouse: they get stuck in a bottleneck, the driver honking impatiently, Léa checking her watch with a sigh. At Hux’s side, Ren stares straight ahead, his big hands resting limply in his lap. Hux takes one and squeezes it.

At long last they arrive — twenty minutes early, by some act of grace. Hans pays the driver as the rest of them hurry inside. Renée’s pretty face is pale, and she takes her cousin by the hand and fairly drags him along, keeping up a hurried stream of worry or encouragement in rapid-fire French. Hux lags behind and allows himself to fall into step with Ren’s father.

Hans Solo is a tall, grizzled, tough-looking man, a former bush pilot rumoured to have been involved in some activities of questionable legality before he met Léa in the early nineties. She was a principal dancer for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens at the time, twenty-seven years old, beautiful and fierce; Hans, ten years older, fell for her at first sight. They got married straightaway, and when Léa’s pregnancy was announced barely three weeks later, it caused an uproar throughout conservative, Catholic Québec that ended with her role as the Swan Queen being handed over to her understudy at once.

Léa gave it up without complaint, publicly stating that she’d prefer to live in peace with the man she loved than dance for a company that wouldn’t accept her. She quit, and shortly after Ben was born, she founded her own company, pointedly named La Résistance. In a brilliant retaliation strike that no one had planned or expected, the fledgling troupe soon shot to fame, out-selling Les Grands Ballets with their very first performance: _Swan Lake…_ with Léa Organa-Solo dancing the part of the Swan Queen.

“Fucking mess, this whole thing, isn’t it?” Hans asks Hux gruffly, meaning the trial.

“Bit of a nightmare,” Hux agrees. He shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like for Ren.”

Hans gives a short chuckle at that: _“Ren,”_ he repeats. “’S weird, hearing him called that, even after all this time.”

“I suppose it would be.”

Hans is quiet for a moment; they walk along the pavement, sunshine glinting off the windows of skyscrapers, pedestrians hurrying along with Tim’s cups clutched in their hands. The weather is growing warmer; at long last, spring is here.

“I wish I’d been there,” Hans says abruptly. Hux looks at him, questioning: “When Ben was a kid,” he explains. “Léa and I split up when he was little, and I went straight out west. Never been good at staying in one place for too long,” he says. “Ended up roaming; went to Halifax, Regina, stayed in Alberta a while — I flew my plane, worked on the oil rigs a little while. Drank a lot,” he adds, rueful. “Trying to drown the guilt, I guess. It was a cowardly thing to do, y’know? Leaving them like that.”

They’ve reached the courthouse; Hux holds the door for Hans. Renée’s and Léa’s heels click loudly on the marble floor of the lobby. Hans lowers his voice as they follow, at a distance, the rest of the family through the halls: the route well-worn by now, by everyone but Hux.

“Léa had a rough time of it. A company and a kid to manage, and she was teaching, too — well, in the end, she stepped down from Résistance; it all got to be too much. I read about it in the papers. Think I was in Oregon, then. She didn’t take a break, though, just started teaching full-time instead; but I always figured, she had Luc, they were so close, he’d help her out. And I knew Ben was dancing — Léa’s kid, there’s no way he wouldn’t — so I figured he’d be fine. Stay out of trouble.

“I visited a few times, for birthdays ‘n shit, and he always seemed okay. Normal kid. Quiet, like — shy, and with that _stare_ of his, I’m sure you know the one,” he adds — and Hux smiles, because yes, he does know that stare, and can exactly picture it on a much younger Ren, big eyes wide and sombre in his grave little face.

Hans sighs, now. “That teacher of his, though,” he says, shaking his head. “I only met him once or twice, but he always rubbed me the wrong way. I thought, if Léa approved, he couldn’t be all bad; and he was _good_ , too, wasn’t he, best in the world or some shit like that? Wasn’t my place to judge, anyhow,” he says. “Was hardly up for Father of The Year.” He rubs a hand over the grey stubble on his chin. “And then this Snoque guy up and moves my son to France. He was, what, thirteen, fourteen then, and by that time I was hardly in his life, ‘m sorry to say — Léa’d implied a few things, said Ben was always kinda messed-up after I’d come out to visit, maybe it’d be better if I stopped visiting at all…So I did, and it sucked, but I figured she knew best.

“And Ben goes to France, and he comes back few years later and he’s some big _star_ now, just like his mother was, and Christ, I’m so proud of him, I’m so happy. I come out to Montréal a couple times just to see him dance, and he’s fucking _amazing._ ‘That’s my son,’ I tell the guy sitting next to me once, ‘I’m Hans Solo and that’s my son…’” Hans trails off, a sad smile on his face. “He didn’t believe me,” he tells Hux. “I could tell; he didn’t. And maybe he was right to,” he says. “I hadn’t been much of a father to him. Maybe I didn’t deserve to call him my son.”

They’ve reached the courtroom by now, but they don’t go in, both choosing to hang back. They have time. Hans leans against the outside wall and shoves his hands in the pockets of his trousers. His suit hangs uncomfortably on his broad frame: he tugs at his collar, trying to loosen his tie like a kid getting his school photos done.

“How did you find out about all of this?” Hux asks him. He’s fascinated and saddened by the saga unfolding before him. He’s heard bits and pieces, of course, from Ren, but never thought about the other side of it, how hard things must have been for his parents, his father.

“Well, Léa called me a few months ago,” Hans answers, “and told me about all this _shit_ Ben’d been through with this teacher of his; and I wanted to kill him. Kill Snoque, or kill myself, because how could he do this to my _son —_ and how could I, his _father,_ have let it happen?” Hans asks, brows drawn angry over his eyes, his voice passionate and furious. He shakes his head. “I failed him. I wasn’t there, and he got hurt. And I couldn’t even _say_ anything,” he says bitterly. “Léa says, we’re going to court, do you have anything to say; and I couldn’t even do _that._ I hadn’t been there to see this happening, so I couldn’t say it had happened at all. I couldn’t get back at this sick _fuck_ for hurting my son the way he did.”

Hux is shocked to see angry tears glimmering in the older man’s eyes. His heart goes out to him. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Solo,” he says sincerely.

“I’m the one who needs to apologise, kid,” Hans says, digging out what looks like an oil-stained handkerchief and swiping perfunctorily at his eyes. “To Ben. To my son.”

“When this is all over,” Hux reassures him, “and you go tell him you’re sorry, he’s going to listen to you. You tell him what you told me, Mr. Solo, and he’ll listen. He misses you,” he tells him. “I know he does. Tell him you came to see him dance.”

Hans nods. “I will,” he says. “Yeah. I sure will.”

From inside the courtroom, they hear the judge calling for order. They hurry in to their seats, the guard at the door giving them a suspicious look before he closes the double doors behind them. Hans and Hux sit alone: Léa, Luc and Renée are all testifying again, and they’re at the prosecutor’s table — as, of course, is Ren.

The defendant’s table is empty but for a stern-faced, balding man who must be Snoque’s lawyer. Hux watches as Ren bends to confer with his own lawyer, a regal-looking woman about Léa’s age, with close-cropped red-brown hair and a sense of calm determination about her. In contrast, Ren looks anxious, restless, and Hux wishes he could go to him, tell him everything will be all right.

_It will be. It must be._

Hux doesn’t know what Ren will do — what _he_ will do — if it isn’t.

*

At the end of the day, Hux can hardly remember anything that happened in the courtroom. All he knows is that it’s over, and they’ve won.

He remembers Snoque: pale, fragile, his tall frame stooped and shrunken now, his cold blue eyes hazed with cataracts and age. He’s old, Hux had realised, older than he’d thought, and clearly very ill. That did not stop the sharp bolt of hate that coursed through Hux as Snoque took the stand and made the last of his weak, untrue protestations of innocence.

Léa spoke. Luc spoke. Even Renée, who had been so young through all of this, spoke out in fierce defence of her cousin. “He is my best friend,” she said, as if daring anyone to contradict her. “And Snoque hurt him. For that we will never forgive him.”

(Her eyes, blazing, met Ren’s, and Hux could see the tears glittering there as Renée took her seat again.)

Ren testified, again, for the last time of dozens. He took the stand looking weary, and he sounded weary, too, as he doggedly rehashed the worst years of his life for judge, court and jury to hear. Hux’s heart ached to watch him.

Ren glanced out to the audience, once, and he caught Hux’s eye. Hux smiled softly, and he tried to tell him, _You are so strong; you are so brave. Keep fighting. It’s nearly over._

Ren looked back to the judge, and he answered the questions put to him; and Hux saw him look Snoque in the eyes as he denounced him, firm and quiet, for a guilty man. He saw Ren raise his chin in defiance, and saw Snoque look abashed, his old eyes filling finally with remorse.

It was then that he knew they had won. _Ren_ had won.

And they did.

“Guilty,” the judge said, and Snoque bowed his head.

A smile broke across Ren’s face like sunrise.

Now — with the court adjourned for good at last, after so many gruelling months — there is a mass exodus from the courtroom, a crushing press of people; Renée is laughing, hugging her aunt and father and uncle, having kissed Ren’s face over and over again as soon as she could get to him. A few reporters wait outside the courtroom door: from the corner of his eye Hux sees Hans and Léa taking charge, standing back-to-back and giving curt statements to different press outlets, united again for the sake of their son.

“It’s all over,” Hux murmurs, finding Ren in the crowd and taking his arm. “You did it. You’re all right.”

Ren smiles down at him, lost for words, relief and joy radiating from his whole being. In the lobby he pulls Hux aside, and he wraps his arms around him and kisses him, slow and deep and grateful, and he says, _“C’est fini._ And we survived.”

Hux laughs, at this, and he nods. Their little scene has drawn curious eyes: Hux sees one of the reporters glancing their way. He checks his watch and then tugs at Ren’s arm: “Come on,” he says. “That’s only half the battle.”

They take a taxi to the theater; Hans, Léa, Luc, and Renée go back to the hotel, promising to take them out for a victory dinner after the show tonight. They rehearse onstage when it is their turn, and Ren dances better, today, than Hux has ever seen him. There is a sense of wonder in his movements, something new and rapturous, and Hux finds himself striving to keep up; feels the two of them growing stronger and better with every step they take.

Ren dances, today, as though he had been shackled, and now he is free.

*

They are backstage. They go on in ten minutes.

This morning’s elation has worn off and been replaced with nerves. They are both capable, experienced dancers; they have each performed thousands of times, to crowds small and massive alike. They should be used to this by now — but, Hux knows, the lingering stage fright never quite goes away.

Ren paces. Their costumes are simple, black pants and black shirts, clinging tight to their skin. Ren’s fists unclench and clench up, as they are wont to do; he whispers counts and steps to himself, wiping his hands on his thighs. Hux goes to him, takes his hand.

“Ren,” he says in a whisper, as the music of the group who are onstage swells, brassy and loud. “We’ll be fine. We _know_ this dance. It’s finished, and it’s perfect, and they’re going to love it. You’ve done this a thousand times.”

“But not like this,” Ren murmurs. “This time he’s out there. He’s watching.”

 _“Ren.”_ Hux squeezes both his hands, looks him straight in the eye. “You’ve come so far. It’s _over._ He can’t hurt you anymore.” He kisses him lightly on the mouth. “We are going to astonish him.”

Ren nods. He squeezes Hux’s hands.

“Places,” a stagehand whispers. The music onstage finishes, and a swell of applause begins. Hux and Ren take their places in the wings.

“Brendon Huxley and Benjamin Organa-Solo,” the MC announces. “Closing the festival, together for the first time.”

Already the audience cheers for them. Ren takes a breath at Hux’s side.

The lights dim to a blackout. They run onstage, take their opening pose and hold it. The audience falls silent, hushed as a winter morning.

 _“Courage,”_ Hux whispers, soft enough that only Ren can hear — and, in this moment, he knows he and Ren are the only ones in the world, two hearts beating in a quiet sea of dark.

 _“Courage,”_ Ren whispers back.

The lights come up. The music starts. They dance.

When the music ends, minutes later, there is silence. Time seems to stop, suspended.

And then comes the applause.

Wave after wave, like a roaring ocean: the house lights come up and they see that the audience are on their feet. They are shouting, cheering for them, for Hux and for _Ben;_ they are grinning, both of them, Ren beaming with a shy boyish light in his eyes. He reaches for Hux’s hand and they bow, together, equals.

When Hux glances out to the upper balcony, he sees a frail, scarred face tracked with tears.

He looks away, and looks back at Ren, who is still staring out, proud, at the masses who cheer for him. He sees a fierceness in his eyes, in his body and his face; there is vitality and defiance and _life_ coursing through his veins. He has danced like never before, like nothing anyone has ever seen. He has won.

*

At last, the lights dim. The curtain falls, landing with a soft velvet _whump;_ stagehands hurry to take down the backdrops, clear the stage for the night. Hux and Ren linger onstage, still standing hand-in-hand. _It’s over. It’s all over._ Hux feels heady with the strange relief of it, the bittersweetness of an ending.

Ren takes him in his arms. “Thank you,” he murmurs. “For everything.”

Hux kisses him. They stay for a moment, together in the dim light, whole and strong and free.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks, once again, to [Redcap64](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Redcap64/pseuds/Redcap64) and [bygoneboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoneboy/pseuds/bygoneboy) for getting me this far — c'est fini and we survived, eh? — and to [hux-you-up](https://hux-you-up.tumblr.com/) for her legal counsel, which I so blatantly ignored! Thank you _also_ to the hugely talented [xan-drei](http://xan-drei.tumblr.com/) for the marvellous art!
> 
> As usual: [my main blog](http://abernathae.tumblr.com/); [my Star Wars blog](http://huxes.tumblr.com/). Come say hi!
> 
> Finally, un énorme merci to everyone who's been reading this from the beginning, and everyone who's joined us along the way. I've been so thrilled with the response to this little AU; I'm so delighted by everyone's comments week-to-week, and I'm just so glad to have been able to share this with all of you. Thank you. ❤️


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